Bring on the contest………..

New monitor in place and ready for ARRL CW contest
Very dusty
This week a new monitor came in via UPS as my old standby monitor after many years of service bit the dust. I ended up ordering the AOC E235F monitor to match my other two 23 in monitors. Oh as a side note if anyone out there has an AOC monitor with a white square that shows up in the upper left hand corner shut off the picture boost bright frame option, which can be found in the monitors menu. Anyway.......With this nice new monitor up and running I did notice only one monitor seemed to be real sharp?? I then did some investigating and found out that my video care (Geforce 9400GT) had
one DVI and one VGA output port. It was the VGA port that was not allowing my new monitor to shine with all it's resolution. I ended up purchasing the Zotac Geforce GT 620 video card. This has two DVI outputs and as with the other care supports dual monitors. A small part of the day today was spend
Rear view of  PC

New on left old on right
removing the Geforce 9400 card and replacing it with the new Zotac GT 620 card. It was great to have the PC out and on the test bench I was able to give the interior a good cleaning. It's very surprising how much dust gets in there and to have the processor nice and clean and running cool will extend the life of the chip. The picture of the back of my PC shows many clip on toroid around most if not every cable as well there is a ground wire grounding the cabinet as well. I also put some snap on chokes on the DVI cable to the new monitor. This way my PC and monitors are RF free!
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

2 Responses to “Bring on the contest………..”

  • Tom KB3HG:

    Mike when you changed video cards did you have to increase the power supply size in the PC? We used AOC at workas replacements and they were on 24/7 .

  • paul kc2nyu:

    Mike- I notice fm the pic of your operating station that you have the P3_SGVA in your P3 and showing on one of your 3 monitors. Do you find the capability(ies) with this extra feature is worth the expense? What can you do now that you couldn’t with just the P3? I have a P3 and have been considering the P3 SGVA.

    73 Paul kc2nyu

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