I took delivery of a new Dell 2407 widescreen monitor today. And very nice it is too. To test it, I plugged it into my MacBook, and within seconds I had a lovely 1920×1200 crystal clear display. Excellent.
However, things were not all well when I tried it on my PC. I thought I’d recount the problems here, for the benefit of others who have run into the same problem as me.
My PC has a Geforce FX 5600 graphics card, with both DVI and VGA ports on it. My old monitor (a 22″ Iiyama CRT) was connected via VGA and ran at 1920×1440. This new Dell came with a DVI port and cable, so I thought I’d use that. Connected it all up, and my PC dropped me to 640×480 – not unusual with a new monitor. I went into the settings and upped the resolution – to 1600×1200. Nothing higher (and nothing widescreen) was available. Hmm.
Now I knew the monitor could do 1920×1200, as I did on my MacBook. I also knew my PC could do above 1600×1200, as I’d run higher on my old monitor. So what on earth was the problem? I updated the Geforce drivers – nothing. Updated the monitor drivers using the CD that came with it – nothing.
Finally, a search on t’t’tinternet led me to the Nvidia forums. It isn’t just me. Other people with a 2407 (and some other similar models) and FX 5600 cards were finding the same thing. Luckily, someone found a solution.
To cut a long story short, Nvidia removed support for 1920×1200 over DVI from the FX drivers in 2003. Over VGA, there’s no problem. Over DVI with version 45.23 of the driver, again, no problem. So I downgraded, and it worked. Amazing.
Sadly, the performance with these ancient drivers was rubbish. You could see windows slowly redrawing on screen when you move them around, so I’ve reinstalled the newest ones and will make do with a VGA connection.
Tch, eh?
