Graphics Card + Widescreen Problems
 

Here is a story I'm sure you've all heard before:

Old graphics card worked ok on widescreen monitor at 1920x1200 but could be upgraded to improve graphics performance.

Old graphics card is replaced with new graphics card to help performance.

New graphics card cannot support the old resolution of the monitor (1920x1200) and is currently only able to get 1600x1000 which just looks plain sucky on the monitor.


Here are the details:

Old graphics card: GeForce 2 MX400
New graphics card: GeForceFX 5200
Widescreen Monitor: DELL 2405FPW


I have the newest drivers installed and I can't help but think what's wrong.

Do I need to replace the graphics card again in order to get the optimum resolution?

Something seems to be messed up with either your graphics card or the monitor driver. The card should support 1920x1200 by default, but you might want to install PowerStrip to add custom resolutions.

Windows itself doesn't support 1900x1200 stock, I believe. Try reinstalling the Dell Drivers.

Also, this is the first time in history anyone's called a FX5200 (widely accepted as NVIDIA's biggest screwup ever) an upgrade. I'll agree with you that it was kind of a step up for you, but not that huge of one.

While I know that the FX5200 isn't really much of an upgrade, the purpose of purchasing this card was to improve graphics performance (not for gaming) and because it was cheap to purchase.

Granted I didn't know that the card was apparently the worst card they had made to date.

The PC is basically my workstation now and that's all I will ever want it to be since my other two machines do everything else for me.

Few bits of additional information that I think may help before I try re-installing everything again when I get back home, is that this is an AGP card and NOT a PCI card. The setup is also a freshly reformatted hard drive and nothing has been installed other than the graphics card drivers and monitor drivers (along with all the Windows Updates).

What set of Nvidia Drivers did you install?

1900x1200 is fine with Windows.

Question: Are you using the VGA or DVI cable? 1900x1200 is above the capabilities of DVI Single-Link, and chances are your card doesn't have Double-Link (it's rather expensive to implement).

I'm using the latest Nvidia driver set: Forceware 91.31


I'm using the DVI cable and I will look into what type of link my graphics card is capable because the monitor does state DVI-D when switching to that mode.

do you have the latest driver for your monitor, or does it display that it is using a default monitor profile? That would artificially limit your maximum resolution.

Just make sure Display settings doesn't list your monitor as 'Default monitor on Geforce FX5200 Series GPU'
The Dell website should have an updated monitor driver .inf file.

Pardon me if this has already been convered or you've already tried ( 4:30am ;_; ), but you can force custom resolutions with the default nVidia drivers:

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/3783/monhg7.th.png

It's what I used to get my current resolution (1280x960 is too small for me nowadays, 1600x1200 is a little overkill though).

Arainach is right... DVI limitations is the culprit here. Grab a old school VGA and see what happens.

Yup, I did try this yesterday and it worked fine on the VGA slot.

Thanks for the help everyone.