Well, somethings gone right! However, I need an explanation

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
04/29/2020 at 02:06 • Filed to: None

I don’t know how this is supposed to work, but I got it functional on my computer, although probably not the way it’s designed to work from the factory. What I need to know is how it is designed to work.

This Acer All-In-One has a slot for a discrete graphics card. Looking at a video of someone disassembling one of these machines I see that there is nothing connected to either port (HDMI or DVI) on the video card in a system with a GPU (GT 520) from the factory . How it’s supposed to output video just being connected to the PCIe slot I do not understand. That’s what I need explained to me.

The slot is meant for a low-profile card, but for shits and grins I put in a full-height GT 730 4GB card (why does something so weak need that much memory?) Of course, the back isn’t on the machine - the card stands above the top of the computer, and I had to insulate a metal post so that it didn’t short out the card. I ran the output of the card to another monitor. The computer is configured to extend the display. I launched FSX, dragged it to the second monitor and it ran just fine, surprisingly getting over 60 FPS with moderate settings. I could drag secondary windows to the main display on the computer as well.

How is a discrete card supposed to help if there is nothing connected to the output of the card . Looking around I see plenty of drivers out there for all sorts of hardware, but only one item, for the IR remote, on Acer’s own site. What I’ve done to run FSX is a weird workaround that I’m sure the factory would never do.

I know that notebooks frequently have discrete graphics, so there must be something to make it work with the internal screen. Do any of you have any clue how this is done? Nvidia has something called ‘Optimus’ but that’s only for mobile chipsets, not the desktop cards that this machine uses. Any ideas?

DISCUSSION (9)

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/29/2020 at 03:34

Didn’t you mention the machine had an HDMI in port? W hat if you ran a cable from the gfx card to that port?

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent
04/29/2020 at 03:37

It does. But I think that’s just to use the screen as a monitor for video games or other HDMI output device. There’s a button on the side to press for HDMI or PC mode. I’ll give it a try in the morning - it can’t hurt, right? It isn’t how it works from the factory, but I'll see what happens.

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/29/2020 at 03:47

Okay I found a forum thread about this where someone says that according to a document (the link no longer works) the 5771 only supports a 520 or 530. No other GPU. They might have something special going on tha https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/changing-graphics-card-on-an-all-in-one-pc.196242/

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/29/2020 at 03:52

the graphics card is an HDMI outp ut device.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent
04/29/2020 at 04:00

Awesome! Thanks for finding that! As I recall, the guts of the 5571 are the same as the 3371, the only difference being a 23" display as opposed to a 21.5".

Since this computer is just a plaything and won’t be used for games I wonder if I should grab a 530 (they have to be cheap nowadays) to experiment with or just ignore it. Or maybe put something else in the slot, like a USB or eSATA card. One of my weaknesses with computers is that I cannot leave an expansion slot unused; I’ll probably stick something in the other PCIe mini slot, as well as adding a third SATA device.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent
04/29/2020 at 04:04

So it doesn’t use the internal display? And the integrated graphics on the CPU doesn’t use the HDMI output? Perhaps I should try hooking up a monitor to the HDMI output when the GT 740 is installed and see what video subsystem drives that port. Once again - can’t hurt...

Jetstreamer > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/29/2020 at 09:16

There is some DirectX tech that can pass the output of a discrete GPU through the integrated GPU with some very, very minor extra latency. It is possible Acer implemented some form of that.

With that DirectX tech it is even possible to buy a cryptocurrency mining card that has no output ports at all and still use it for gaming as long as you have an integrated GPU that you can mirror the output to. I know Linus Tech Tips has done one or two videos on it, using that technique for different things.

Grindintosecond > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/29/2020 at 09:28

The data traveling through the PCIe slot is two way. So think about this witchery. There were g-sync monitors and Freesync monitors. G-sync was Nvidia tech, AMD the other. But AMD didn’t have any bleeding edge awesomecards like the 1080ti. So what people discovered, was to run an onboard graphics CPU (2400g, 3400g) and an Nvidia card in the pcie slot, and the monitor output through the onboard HDMI socket which is used by the onboard APU processor, which attaches the freesync signal to the nvidia graphics processing...whala...a high end card with freesync output to freesync monitor .

Downside is you have a 4 core 8 thread cpu at best.

so it works by doing just that in your laptop. just two-way communicating over that slot and rerouting data.

facw > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/29/2020 at 09:33

Assume it’s just sending the output back over the PCI-E bus and loading it into the integrated graphics frame buffer in memory, then letting the integrated graphics actually push that out to the ports.