Recently, I had some trouble getting the HTC Vive to work with a Gigabyte G1 GTX 1080 video card. The video card only has 1 HDMI port, which was being used by my monitor. So I tried connecting the Vive via the Mini Display Port on the Vive Linkbox. Steam VR could not find the Vive in this manner no matter how many times I tried.

I didn’t see a ton of stuff on google about this, but I ended up cooking up a simple workaround that others might find valuable -

  1. plug the Vive’s HDMI cable directly into your video card’s HDMI port.
  2. plug your monitor’s HDMI cable into the Vive linkbox’s HDMI port where the Headset would normally go.
  3. connect the linkbox to your video card by way of a Mini Display Port to Display Port cable.
  4. it should now work flawlessly.

My understanding is that this is currently a bug, so hopefully this workaround shouldn’t be needed for long. In any case, hopefully this info saves someone else hours of grief.