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[Melodic]

Seeing as how my PC monitor is infinitely better than the CRT television I have, I've been wanting to plug into my LCD monitor for awhile. While I understand the basic concept behind all this, I'm not entirely sure which cable I need to buy. I'm also hell of not knowing what kind of HD settings to apply to a monitor. In addition to input to the monitor, is it possible to run digital sound through my computer speakers (I have the X-Fi Fatal1ty with faceplate, so I do have digital-in options over my PC. Can I run Xbox sound through auxiliary over my computer?). Thanks!

[Dimmukane]

The audio part I'm positive can be done, quite a few people have chosen to play on their monitors.  I'm assuming that your monitor has a DVI and a VGA port?  There are cables for the 360-VGA connection, just google it, and I'm pretty sure a DVI-VGA adaptor will work if the connection has to be DVI.

[dennis]

They sell a VGA cable for the 360 (about $40), and I believe they're coming out with an HDMI cable soon, which can easily be converted to DVI. If you have the composite AV cable for the Xbox, you're definitely going to need to buy a new cable as you're  not going to get better resolution out of composite than you already have. If you have the component HD cable, there are third party component to DVI adapters available, but it's probably cheaper just to buy a new cable.

DVI, being a digital signal, will look better on a digital monitor than VGA, which is analog. Not all LCD displays are digital, though.

As for the audio, you should be able to plug in the digital coax from the 360 directly into the Fatal1ty and set the card to decode dolby digital.

[Melodic]

I must admit, monitors are my major downfall when it comes to computers. This is my monitor. According to Future Shop, it can run in both analog and digital. I have been using an analog cable for the last 6 months: I should look into this.

That being said, is this the right cable for the job? Would I plug this into my analog or digital plug on my monitor? Will this work as well as an HD-TV? Thanks again for the help, mates.

[Jenno]

Yep that's the right cable, you'll be plugging that into the analog port on the monitor. Don't bother with an adapter to dvi with your current 360 as they can only output an analog signal regardless of what it's plugged into. The new 360 with HDMI is going to have a completely different scaler chip (basically the chip that runs the output), as the current scaler chip in the 360 is analog only. Using DVI/HDMI via an adaptor with your current 360 will look the same, if not worse than just using the VGA cable, as the dvi signal will just be converted from analog anyway.

You probably could use the VGA cable for input into a HDTV but there's really no point, as not many HDTV's accept full resolution input over VGA and that's if they even have a VGA input. The component inputs are perfectly adequate for a high def tv.

Oh also, be warned about running the 360 on your monitor, a friend of mine did this when he first got his 360 and he had a lot of issues with widescreen being stretched across the whole monitor, as well as some similar stuff. This was only peculiar to a few games though...

[Melodic]

Thanks for the heads up, Jenno. Seems that, since 1280x1024 is a 5:4 ratio, the Xbox would try to project a widescreen image onto a square surface. Probably why the stretching occurs. Game developers can choose to release patches to fix this with their specific games, or we can bump the resolution down/up. Thanks for the help on cables, too. Now if only they weren't $40.