PC Gaming on my HDTV… How I Did it and Why I Love it!
Friday, June 25th, 2010I just took the time last week to figure out how to hook my PC up in the basement to my 50″ plasma HDTV up on our first floor of our house. After gaming on it for the past week, I don’t know if I’ll ever go back!!
So here’s what I did… I’ve got a geforce 9800 gtx card in my PC with a 2nd DVI port and a Creative X-Fi card that I wanted to run cabling to the entertainment center in our living room. It took me a lot of time to pull together everything I need, so I thought I’d list them out here in case I can help anyone searching around the way I did in order to make it happen. These are the things I needed to order to make this work:
- A 50′ ft (28AWG) HDMI Male to DVI-D Male Digital Video Cable
to go from the DVI port on the graphics card to the HDMI port on my receiver.
- An Accell UltraAudio Digital Coaxial Audio Cable
with a Cables to Go 3195 RCA Jack to 3.5mm Mono Plug Adapter
to run a digital audio signal out of my Soundblaster X-Fi to my receiver.
- A USB 2.0 Active Extension / Repeater Cable A Male to A Female
to plug in the bluetooth adapter for my Logitech Wireless Desktop MK700 Keyboard and Laser Mouse
.
- 11′ Electric Fiberglass Wire Pull Rods Fish Tape
to get the wires fished from the basement up through the drywall.
- And in order to site back on the couch comfortably with the keyboard and mouse I got a Futura Computer Desk for Gamers w/ One Max Mouzpad & One Regular Mouzpad
that I can fold and store behind the couch.
In order to deal with the overscan issues, I’m using a custom resolution of 1864×1048 and it is working beautifully. I’ll admit I’ve got an Xbox 360 and a PS3 that I may never play again now that I have this set up. Nothing beets the quality of the image from the graphics card and the precise control of a keyboard and mouse.
One more thing… with this setup, I’ve come to love the ability in Chrome to hold control and scroll the mouse wheel in order to zoom in and out on web pages. It makes it easy to read and browse while sitting 9′ away from my 50″ plasma TV.
I’d love to hear more stories from other gamers out there that have made the jump to using a big screen HDTV for their PC gaming!
