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hardware: use TV as a monitor? (feddit.nl)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all My kid will get a gaming pc soon. I can't swallow the cost of a whole setup at the moment. I'm thinking of getting a good motherboard with a decent second hand graphics card (a colleague I trust can find me one). And over time upgrade where needed. For monitor I would be using my TV.

Is this a smart idea? We'd have a wireless mouse/keyboard and some table thing to game from the couch.

At the moment my kid is into Roblox and Minecraft, but I assume once his pc can run more; he'll play 'real' games. We are also looking to learn to program (scratch/python). Would that work on a TV?

The TV is an older model (10 years old).

Edit; Thanks everyone for the ideas and advice. We'll try the TV first. And will also look into a steamdeck. It's nice to get such positive feedback from everyone!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No harm in trying it first. Beyond basic connectivity, here are some things you’ll need to check for.

You’ll want to make sure you can turn off overscan in your TV settings or the edges of what the computer will display will be cut off in the image. This can make navigating things like the Windows desktop a little difficult.

Then you’ll want to make sure responsiveness is acceptable. Perform any action (click something, type something in Notepad, etc.) and make sure the TV displays it instantly. If not, you will need to enable Game Mode on your TV if it is available. Sometimes a Sports mode will get you there too. If such a mode isn’t on your TV and there are no other settings that reduce the response delay, you’ll need a dedicated monitor.

If you’re OK on both of these things, the only thing left would be stuff like resolution and color matching. For the best image, make sure the computer is set to use the TV’s native resolution. This may not necessarily be the highest resolution available, FYI. As an example, I have TVs that are 720 native but will accept and display 1080, albeit things don’t look great at that scale. Your mileage may vary. For color matching, don’t worry too much about accuracy if you’re not doing things that require a perfectly calibrated display. Set the picture mode on the TV to whatever vivid/movie/sports/etc color mode works for you, but keep in mind some of these can affect the delay depending on the TV (see above).