Dreaded 1680 x 1050 issue.

bullets

Morning,

Had an ATI 4850 card in my machine and it was happily displaying 1680 x 1050 native resoultion with my Acer x223 (22" widescreen LCD)

I upgraded my card to a Sapphire ADI 5850 Toxic edition which is a lovely sweet card for the price and could not get my native resolution.
(I've got the latest Catalist control center & drivers)

When I listed all modes (rather than just compatible modes) and forced it to 1680 x 1050 I ended up locking my system and bluescreening Could not even boot to safe mode, or command prompt, windows repair would not work, anything I tried did not work. I ended up re-installing vista and then upgrading to windows 7. (2 days later finally have all my software back
installed with only a few minor losses such as some licence keys that had expired)

Problem is Windows wont detect the capabitities of the monitor and
will only detect it as a generic plug and play.

Acer's drivers are old and dont install, I found some 3rd part ones,
and windows 7 blocks them after booting saying they are incompatible.

I used powerstrip softare to generate a driver .inf file but trying to manually
point it to it, or right clicking and trying to install it wont work.

When I uncheck the hide modes my monitor cant display I am able
to select 1680 x 1050 in 30i Hz but get black screen and need to unplug the dvi cable out and put it back in again to get my old resolution back.

I'm currently running at 1400 x 1050 @60hz this is not 16:10 widescreen but
it seems to be the only resolution where my text fonts are sharp and looks best, all the others even if 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio dont look as good.

Cant stand not having my native resoultion.
in my online Lord of the rings game now instead of looking like a tall thin elf I look more like a short fat hobbit!
and badcompany2 just looks Odd.

Anyone got any suggestions ?
This resolution is been around a few years now so still cant understand
why so much games and even drivers software dont support it.

~B

bullets

And the problem gets worse.

When trying to test out different resolutions where it asks you do you
want to keep the setting or revert (where it reverts after 15 seconds)
I get a black screen saying input no supported and it does not reset back
to the last good resolution. When I reboot, or unplug monitor cable, and goto safe mode, it still boots up and goes back to a black screen that I cant get out of. (with all the apps working fine only I just cant see them)

Uninstalling drivers did not work, Even after uninstalling all graphics drivers
and reverting back to 640 x 480 on windows safe mode it still wont boot right. It would not let me uninstall ATI catalyst control center from safe mode instead I had to plug in an old CRT to get a display running.

Luckily I had an old 17" dell CRT screen
plugged that into the 2nd DVI slot and I could get the display working on that. through that, finally managed to set that to secondary, set the LCD to primary and change the resolution back to a safe one.

Still does not solve the issue of not being able to switch it to its native resolution though :mad:

~B

marco_polo

Do you know what version of CC were you on before changing the 4850 to the 5850 and which are you on now?

Likely the problem now is that there is a conflict between whatever 3rd party drivers that you tried to install and the ATI ones, only the ATI CCC drivers should have been installed the OS re-install. Also card drivers are notorious for not uninstalling properly .

What I would do is have a look at driver sweeper and see if that can get rid of all traces of both the 3rd party drivers you installed, and the ATI CCC drivers. Then try again to install only ATI CCC 10.2.

No idea what happened on the orignally install, if you were on 10.2 CCC then the cards should have swapped with no issues. Something somwhere must have got confused

Best of luck.

bullets

Cheers will try drivesweeper to see if there is still anything installed
that should not be.

the 3rd part ones did cause a conflict after I installed them but the problem was there before I tried them. (have since removed them and reinstalled latest CCC)

The Scary thing was usually if you were to switch to an unsupported
screen mode, you would get the typical flicker, black screen and after a few
seconds it would go back to the previous working version. It was weird that
it just stuck on the black screen and does not return. Even weirder was connecting a different monitor booting normally, changing the resolution to
a safe one, shutting down, reconnecting LCD and rebooting results in
the same black screen.

(I'm soo glad I did not bring that heavy 17" CRT to the recycle plant)

Had not realized my PC knowledge was so rusty, I used to fix computers
for a living at one stage in the 90's a lot of the buzz words and stuff has changed, and have
found I dont know very much nowadays had to laugh though Windows 7 still uses chkdsk.

~B

PogMoThoin

Driver sweeper would need to be run in safe mode (f8 when booting usually) when the drivers are not in use

marco_polo

Oops rather Important point ommited ^^^

Dublin_Gunner

You could also try installing the 'driver only' on the 10.2 / 10.3 drivers (i.e don't install CCC) and using ATI Tray Tools instead.

Never much liked CCC

Venom

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

You could also try installing the 'driver only' on the 10.2 / 10.3 drivers (i.e don't install CCC) and using ATI Tray Tools instead.

Never much liked CCC

Problem is Win7 hates Ati Tools so alot of ****ing around is needed to get it to work.

Does it detect the monitor as a non-PnP monitor? I noticed that Windows 7 seems to restrict the amount of modes you can use with no EDID data. It must be some sort of driver issue if it worked with the 4850.

PogMoThoin

Venom wrote: »

Problem is Win7 hates Ati Tools so alot of ****ing around is needed to get it to work.

No, its just the 64bit version needs a digitally signed driver which ATT can't afford to pay M$ for. Sign it Yourself
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=dseo