Hi gang,
I want to share the story of upgrading my studio workstation (i7 980X, 24GB RAM, Win7 x64 Ultimate) to large displays (UHD/4K) just in case someone is thnking about doing the same. This whole endeavour took me a couple of days to get everything sorted. Here's what happened.
First I bought a new graphics card that supports UHD/4K displays. I went with a PNY GeForce GTX 970 first and I got 2 Samsung UHD/4K TV sets. Also I got a mini DisplayPort->HDMI adapter because the graphics cards only have one HDMI port so I needed to adapt a mini DisplayPort to HDMI.
Proud and highly motivated I reached my studio with all that gear and started to change the old GeForce GTX 285 with the newly acquired graphics card and hooked up the new monitors plus my old 30" Apple Cinema Display (via DVI). Result: one 4K display worked just fine, the other one (using the adapter) only worked at 1080p FullHD. Wow! What's wrong? Tried different adapters, different cables, flipped the displays. Nothing. Holy crap!
It took me a while to understand that this damn PNY card didn't support UHD/4K via its mini DisplayPort outputs. The product sheet said otherwise. So I returned that card and got me a Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 card with DisplayPort connectors instead of the miniDP and a corresponting DP->HDMI adapter that supports 4K resolution. When I hooked it up, it just worked as expected ... almost.
As I mentioned above, I tried to use 2 x UHD/4K displays (via HDMI and DP) plus my old 30" Apple Cinema Display (via DVI). Both TV sets have to be set to HDMI UHD (simply activate this option in the UHD TV set). Looked really nice and perfect ... until I launched Cubase 8 Pro. Wow, can't run it because an error message tells me to activate Windows Aero. But for some unknown reason I couldn't activate it and Cubase 8 Pro won't run without Aero on Win7. A few hours (and a considerable amount of grey hair) later I found the solution:
Once I disconnect the Apple display everything was fine, UHD/4K looks GREAT, Aero is active, Cubase 8 Pro runs like a charm and I can enjoy the massive displays. phew, that was quite a task.
So if you think about doing the same (or similar), I hope I gave you an idea about potential troubles and how I solved them. If you have questions: Feel free to ask.
Cheers
Martin
PS: Once I've cleaned up the space I will post a picture what it looks like now.