Years ago, Dell said that it was going to implement DisplayPort in all of its products (see a Dell white paper from 2006), removing the VGA port to make their notebooks much thinner, yet we are still to see any Dell notebooks that have made this change, even in top of the line models.
Notebooks, such as the MacBook Air, are getting thinner and thinner and Dell’s DisplayPort switch over promised to deliver this to even entry level notebooks. It was Fudzilla’s “first glance” review of the Dell Vostro 1310 that brought this back into my thoughts. Clearly this is a notebook that would benefit greatly from a DisplayPort connector in terms of thickness and yet, like all Dell notebooks, it doesn’t have one.
I bought a Dell 2408WPF monitor with a DisplayPort connector (it even came with a cable) when it was first released in the UK and have yet to have anything with DisplayPort that can connect to it. I briefly got an NVIDIA 9600GT from Gainward to connect to it but the card’s DisplayPort was seemingly untested and seriously flawed, as it would only even send a signal to the monitor once out of every few times I would try to turn the computer on (the solution being to plug DVI in, turn the computer on, turn the computer off and unplug DVI each time to get DisplayPort back on). Gainward have also brought out an ATI HD4870 with the port but as I already have a HD4870X2 from Sapphire and still have a bad taste in my mouth from Gainward’s 9600GT, it’s just not worth the switch.
Tags: rant