DVI to VGA PIN layout?

A DVI to VGA connector came with my graphics card and it pretty much all the pins to connect to the dvi though it is possible not all are being used, but then there are some adapters sold as new that do not have all the pins on the dvi side. Is this normal?

 

Check the DVI Wikipedia page. The pinouts for DVI-A (which is what any DVI-VGA in-line converter is going to be) are only active on 17 pins. No reason to fabricate a plug with pins that aren't getting used if it saves you money.

 

Yeah, my adapter does not match the DVI-A exactly - it has one side of 9 pins and then the dash pin in the middle

 

Looks like the 4 pins you are describing as missing are the metadata pins. I'd think the picture would still work without the metadata stream. However, it is still going to be DVI-A if you are converting in-line from VGA to DVI or vice versa. Lots of display devices aren't happy with DVI-A, and I'm not sure that most GPUs will work with DVI-A out.

 

Finally it seems an active one: DVI-D (digital) to VGA converter.

The seller says "any DVI-D" to "any VGA".

It does NOT work for me.

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Well, I am using the dvi to vga adapter to connect an old monitor to the pc. It works. I am assuming the old monitor does not support the "metadata" stream.

 

Good stuff. I guess I'm wrong about the DVI-A support then, cause without an expensive converter box, there's no converting between DVI-D and VGA.

Danny, if someone is saying they have a cheap in-line converter that will do DVI-D to VGA, they are lying. DVI-D to VGA needs basically a realtime transcoder to convert the digital datastream in to an analog video signal. The two types of signals are fundementally different, there is no way to simply shunt them from pin to pin like there is between DVI-A and VGA. You could also do DVI-I to VGA (DVI-I is integrated, both digital and analog at the same time), but that is just going to split the DVI-A and DVI-D signals apart and shunt only DVI-A to the VGA connector.

 

With respect to my situation, the graphic card supports it, they included an adapter in the box. Their included adapter has all the pins however, it was damaged ane would not fit correctly over the port so I used the one that Dell includes with their monitors and that was the one with the missing pins. I do not think the card is DVI-A, it can also output to an HDMI adapter.

 

Probably DVI-I then. The simple fact is no matter what you do, VGA is analog and DVI-D is digital, so if you simply send the DVI-D signal through the VGA plug, all you will get is a jumbled mess on any display device expecting a VGA signal. You need either DVI-A or DVI-I or else a converter box to convert DVI to VGA.