acer 5610z video bios tweak

Hello,
I'm having troubles with my laptop with integrated intel 945 chipset video. Connecting an external monitor to VGA port and trying to set resolution to 1920x1080 results in messed display on the monitor. the monitor is working fine on another computer. What I notice in info section of the monitor OSD is that there is small differences in timings. On the working computer it shows 59.9Hz and on the problematic one it shows 60Hz. I was playing with xrandr setting different mode manually but it always results in the same timings used on the monitor. So I'm thinking video bios is doing me crap. But I don't know how to tweak it preferably without flashib bios but if necessary I can do that.

I have already tried the bios from another thread [1] with updated intel video bios, but it results in blank screen starting the laptop so I had to recover to the last bios from manufacturer.

[1] http://forum.notebookreview.com/ace...machine-acer-aspire-9420-a-6.html#post6131976

 

the difference of just .1hz wont make any difference
the problem must be something else.

 

Well, I guess 0.1 hz is not significant but it shows that the video on the laptop is perhaps not exactly following what monitor expects. But what I find even stranger is that selecting 1600x900 as a resolution, the monitor OSD reports 1440x900 instead. I am wondering if there is some problem with the monitor analog to digital converter (this happens even on the machine the problematic resolution works).

I'm finding myself struggling how to debug the issue.

 

some monitors etc will show it at 60hz because they will round it up to the nearest number, others show it as it really is ie 59.9
I have over the years had monitors show 60 and others on the same system show just 59(so a whole 1hz out ) and still work fine
what monitor\tv you trying to connect too?

 

monitor is lcd nec e231w and laptop is acer aspire 5610z with integrated video. I tried connecting my neighbour's LCD TV and picture was same as with the monitor.

I am finding a post in ubuntu forums that another guy had the same problem with same machine. Perhaps something broken in hardware? Could it be some limitation of the video DAC making signal for higher resolutions flacky or something? I tried manually setting the monitor timings based on edid of monitor but no luck as well. That's why I'm thinking it must be hardware.

 

I got it working in full HD resolution! Since it is obvious the video card is providing different (albeit just a little) timing than the cards that do work, I decided to try something very different in the hope to find a mode that will be liked by the monitor. My first attempt was running at 75Hz and OSD immediately showed OUT OF RANGE. Surprisingly though behind the OSD picture was perfect. Moving down to 65Hz made monitor firmware happy, still picture being nice. Changing only 1-2Hz doesn't help. I don't know how that can be done on windows but here is how to do it in X11 environment:

Code:

$ cvt 1920 1080 65
# 1920x1080 64.93 Hz (CVT) hsync: 72.98 kHz; pclk: 188.00 MHz
Modeline "1920x1080_65.00"  188.00  1920 2048 2248 2576  1080 1083 1088 1124 -hsync +vsync
$ xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_65.00"  188.00  1920 2048 2248 2576  1080 1083 1088 1124 -hsync +vsync
$ xrandr --addmode VGA1 1920x1080_65.00
$ xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080_65.00 --below LVDS1

This will make sure virtual screen is fitting 2048x2048. That is beneficial to make full hardware acceleration for these chipsets available. I'm not sure I can cite the reference here.
Still struggling to make lightdm execute these as a setup script though.

UPDATE: for console frame buffer this can be added to kernel command line: video=VGA-1:1280x800, this is laptop screen native resolution so if external monitor has higher resolution, there are just big black borders. It is possible to set it like: video=VGA-1:1920x1080-24@65 (kernel calculates cvt/gtf by itself) but it makes no real sense if integrated display is not disabled.
UPDATE2: xrandr script needed correct selinux context, now it is working for lightdm as a display-setup-script

Now if somebody can advice how can I tweak the stupid VIDEO BIOS to produce the correct timings that would be awesome. It's a pain to configure that, especially on pre-configured multimedia linux distributions on stick.