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You can also buy these with a passthrough, which is useful for older systems that balk at higher resolution monitors.

I have a 2011 era AMD FX8350 system where the onboard 880G northbridge+video chipset doesn't output video over HDMI correctly with a 4k display. Hooking up one of these inline to tell it to send a 1080p image works great, which the monitor does a 2x integer upscale to 4k.

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I also have a couple of passthroughs -- I probably should have mentioned them in the post as another option. The one I have is fancy -- it can read the EDID from a monitor, save it, and use it as an override for another monitor.

Another awesome thing is it can force the monitor to always be detected. One of my monitors virtually unplugs itself when I shut it off, which causes a bunch of issues for me, and the passthrough completely solved it. The one I use is the HD-EWB by THWT.

Doug, thanks for mentioning this. I didn’t realize pass-through ones existed. I’ll check out the one you have. Nice article btw.

Thank you! Hopefully it works for you.

I guess I should reword the way I said something in the previous message: when I said "it can force the monitor to always be detected", I really should have said "it forces the monitor to always be detected".

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