Teach me some HDMI.

[maarkr]

I bought a 27" Samsung LED monitor which has a VGA and an HDMI port. I hooked it up to my XFX Radeon HD6790 card and loaded the latest driver from the website for the monitor, but the monitor would crash -- driver crash I'm guessing cause you get the telltale vertical lines. Before using this monitor I had two 19" widescreen mons using DVI and had no issues with them.
I then used the HDMI port on the card but got a couple of black screens, so I also hooked up the VGA to the monitor with less issues. Now I show two monitors in device manager-- a Generic PnP and the SC500 Analog. Checked latest ATI drivers.

Now for the questions.
Are there issues with using older graphics cards for HDMI? It says it supports HDMI 1.4a, but i cannot find any spec for the monitor.
Should I just use the HDMI from the mobo (Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H) or does that use resources that I need to edit/produce music?
I thought it was odd for the new monitor to have a VGA instead of a DVI port?
Will using a new ethernet hdmi cable do anything for me?
I guess I'll want to yank the VGA cable, but why was i getting screen blackouts with only the HDMI hooked up?

 

[Beezy]

If you have another HDMI laying around to test with try that, also roll back the GPU driver and download an earlier version maybe (non beta). also make sure all other devices are updated too.