Should you plug your monitor into a GPU or motherboard?

If you’ve just finished building your desktop computer or are trying to reconnect cables after changing your setup, it’s common to wonder whether you should plug the monitor into the GPU or motherboard. The answer is that you should always prioritize your graphics card in every situation. Many users, especially beginners, make common mistakes when setting up a new computer and connecting the monitor to the motherboard, only to get scared when no image appears. Since the motherboard is the part of the hardware that the CPU, RAM, storage, and almost everything else connects to, it’s logical to think that the monitor would be there as well.

But even when the motherboard has a video output, you rarely use it, especially if you’ve built a gaming PC with a dedicated graphics card, since the monitor must remain connected to the GPU. In this case, connecting the cable in the right place avoids any loss of performance and unnecessary scares. When your PC connects directly to the GPU, the desktop can use the full potential of the dedicated graphics card for gaming, editing, and other tasks. This isn’t to say that motherboard video output is useless, but it should never be your first option.

The GPU serves as your desktop’s primary video output, as it exists exclusively to render images. It has its own video memory, hundreds of graphics cores, and far greater bandwidth than any integrated graphics solution. So it can output everything to your monitor in the best possible quality, making other video outputs unnecessary. The motherboard, meanwhile, has video outputs so you can plug in your HDMI or DisplayPort cable for a few specific reasons. Not everyone needs a graphics card, especially when the focus is not on gaming, but on office tasks.

Some processors include integrated graphics to reduce these costs, and in these cases you must use the motherboard’s video outputs. The important thing is to identify what hardware your office has, especially if you lack experience with this type of setup. No matter what brand of graphics card you have in your PC, you can ignore the motherboard outputs and connect the monitor directly to it. If you have a more basic version and your AMD processor ends in G, or your Intel processor does not have the F suffix, motherboard inputs are your options.

If you want a dual monitor setup, there are a few tips and tricks, but if your graphics card doesn’t have the ports you would need, you can use the motherboard for this purpose. But to achieve this, many things must be done well. The first is that the processor must have integrated graphics and concurrent use must remain enabled in your motherboard BIOS. The correct term and path to enable it will likely vary depending on your motherboard manufacturer, but it will often appear as iGPU Multi-Monitor.

However, this setting is more appropriate if you want to use your second screen for simpler tasks, like using Discord or watching videos while gaming. This setting is not recommended for gaming on both displays, as the processor’s integrated graphics aren’t exactly great. While this might work as an option for people who want an extra screen, it should still be done on a GPU. In addition to the performance drop from integrated graphics, you may still experience driver conflicts and the CPU may consume too much RAM.