I have an alienware laptop with a 1080p display and was wondering about plugging it into my 1080p T.V. I haven’t tried it yet but the thought crossed my mind as I plan on upgrading my T.V to 4k soon. Will upgrading to 4k on my T.V. have any effect on picture quality if nothing changes with my laptop
*Didn’t mean for this to go to VR section. Sorry!!!
Hmmm, assume you are going to use HDMI cable. It should display whatever is on pc screen, it might “upsample” resolution on 4K tv, I don’t know for sure. All my tv’s and monitor are 1080P. Thinking about a new monitor, but the “specirfication terms” are daunting, so need to understand them better so I know the one I choose is going to work on Laptop. I think 49" curved it too big, but 32" is too small, like samsung and asus, but want something in the 38" arena. It has to be 4K, even though my Laptop not capable of that, so when upgrade in couple years, it can display it them. Why not wait, my 32" is getting to small for visual field.
Thanks! I figure displaying it on 4k won’t make a difference since it will only display the native resolution which is 1080p. Just wondered if anyone has seen an improvement going to 4k this way regardless.
The laptop will just treat a TV like it would treat a monitor.
What resolution and refresh rate you can set will depend on your laptop’s GPU and whether you have clone desktop or extend desktop active.
In clone desktop you will be limited to the laptops native screen resolution.
In extend you can set a different resolution (4k for the TV for example)
Depending on GPU and driver options there may be an option to “use only this display” and therefore use only the external (TV) as your display. It may be possible to get s tiny bit of extra performance this way.
Unless your laptop is fairly new with a fairly good gpu then expect 4k@30
Very good info. I’ll look into when it comes time to plug it into my TV. 
I’ve been using my 4K TV for my PC gaming for the last 3 years in my living room. They’ll look just as good.
One thing to note for you is whether your Alienware laptop has the GPU capability to push 4x the number of pixels into 4K. It would look better, sure. But at the expense of your FPS performance if your laptop GPU isn’t powerful enough to keep up with it.
But for your 1080p TV, it should perform just the same, unless you open both the laptop screen and the TV at the same time.
I haven’t experimented yet with settings in nvidia control panel to see what is going on with setting up another display. I did use a second monitor years ago for doing my graphic arts related stuff. I’ve never seen if I can make the TV when I plug it in the primary display so it’s not on both screens. I’ll figure out my options and go with the best thing I can figure out. I’m hoping my laptop (i7 8500, gtx 1070, 32 gigs ram) will give me an option to display at greater than 1080p.
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