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Comment by epaik | Hacker News Reader

I've ordered one, but I'm more than a little concerned about the potential 30% failure rate that I read about in the previous thread.

I'm a little bit curious though, as to WHY exactly these screen's failure rates are so high, or how they fail. If there's any way to prolong my LCD's life I'd like to be made aware.

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That 30% is anecdotal from ONE guy's company that bought a few of these monitors. The sample size is too small, and also there are multiple Korean OEMs selling similar monitors. Some are using nicer boards than others, the same way some are using nicer casing than others.

I've heard murmurring of people getting Square warranties for these monitors. Might be worth investigating if the failure rate is a concern for you. ~$300+warranty costs will still be significantly less than a Cinema Display.

Perhaps that's why they're £200?

Also, they don't work with some video cards (I know my Radeon 5750 has occasional trouble syncing with my HP LP2475W for some reason, but that's single-link DVI only. I imagine these monitors are dual-link DVI displays?)

Of course they're cheap for a reason. I was just a little bit interested in the technical details of what causes a display like this to fail.

And yes, these monitors are dual-link dvi only.

Just to be clear: the 5750 is supposed to be dual-link capable, but the ebay sellers for these monitors all seem to state that they don't work with the 5750 (nor a bunch of other ATI & NVidia graphics cards of similar vintage).

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