It worked out of the box. I have a Samsung high end monitor with controls like a little joy stick on the bottom right in the back of the monitor. It's given me problems before. I hooked up a different monitor and that worked right away. Then back to the Samsung and that's working now too! Enough of that, this machine is sick, it's fast and it's slick. But it's also a behemoth! this thing is huge and weighs almost 40 lbs, but it has a convenient carry handle. LOL, I don't know if too many people would want to lug this thing around. It's got all kinds of ports for just about everything everywhere you look. But only 1 HDMI video out which I thought was surprising. It's got several other Video ports I'm not familiar with. I only had HDMI cables so that limited my ability to test when I was having my initial issues getting output to the screen. So far I have not done a lot, but it boots up fast, which is good. The screen rez I used is almost 4k x 3k (sorry not at that machine now to get exact specs). But that makes the apps and font very small. So there is a setting in the Display Properties you can tell it to display apps at say 150% of the size (there are many other settings. That helps a lot so you can see what you are doing. But I'm not sure if that counteracts the high rez display settings. You cannot set the apps individually. I'll write more once I get to using it more. I don't play a lot of games but I do do some video editing and I record online meetings and create videos using Camtasia. Camtasia can create very large files if you record long videos. Sometimes the raw files can be almost 20GB in size if the video is 2 hours or so. So I wanted a large fast powerful PC to be able to work with those files, store them, and not have It crash on me which has happened and I've lost entire projects a few times. You can't go back because it was a real time event so my work was totally lost! I've been buying HP machines now for about 15 years. My last PC was an ASUS, while I like it it had the same problem my ASUS laptop has been having which is the Disk usage jumps up to 100% and the machine grinds down to running like molasses. It's been almost a year and I've tried every recommendation I could find online but the problem keeps coming back! Prior to ASUS my previous machine all had been HP so I went back to HP on this one. I've had pretty good luck with the HPs. Only standard problems, 2 video cards blew out, 1 hard drive, and 1 power supply. Not bad really considering I have my machines on all the time 24/7. Only occasionally turn them off if I might go on a trip for a few days.