4870 not displaying 1920x1080 on Acer H233H

Hello,
I just bought an Acer H233H and have it connected to my ATI 4870 via HDMI. The native resolution on the monitor is 1920x1080. I set the display resolution to this setting, but the image of the desktop does not fill the full screen. Instead the desktop is framed by wide, approx. 1 inch, black margins on the screen. It seems my card is stuck on 1680 x 1050. This resolution will fill the screen. Any lower resolution will be be blown up too large to fit on the screen and only a portion of the desktop can be seen.

Does anyone know why my graphics card is doing this?
Thanks,
Kyle

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Try changing the refresh rate to 60 HZ.
You should be able to get lower resolutions.

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Reply to evongugg

Hello Kyle,
have you mamaged to solve the 1 inch gap problem? I also have the Acer H233H with ATI Radeon HD4670 connected via HDMI. 1680x1050 fills the screen but it does not look good, I'd definitely prefer the native 1920x1080 resolution (refresh rate 60 Hz does not help at all).

Thanks for your advice,
Martin

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to Timespotter

Timespotter wrote :

Hello Kyle,
have you mamaged to solve the 1 inch gap problem? I also have the Acer H233H with ATI Radeon HD4670 connected via HDMI. 1680x1050 fills the screen but it does not look good, I'd definitely prefer the native 1920x1080 resolution (refresh rate 60 Hz does not help at all).

Thanks for your advice,
Martin

Hey Martin,
In a way I sort of did and sort of did not. To tell you the truth I don't know all the details, but I'll share what I know.

Possibility #1:
It turns out HDMI has some kind of proprietary design to it, it must have a patent or something, and a company cannot fully integrate HDMI into their device without paying the HDMI founders group some licensing fee. It turns out ACER did not pay this licensing fee for the H233H monitor and therefore HDMI is weird. If this seems strange I totally agree. Why bother even adding an HDMI port if it is not going to work? It has been a few months and my memory is fuzzy, but I remember spending time with ACER support (a few hours on the phone I think, because I can't find an email record) and they either backed this up or gave no better answer.

Possibility #2
This is all the video card's fault. The wikipedia article on HDMI mentions something about HDCP licensing, which might be what I am referring to above. Further, we might have bought a card that supports the wrong HDMI version (or the monitor supports the wrong version! I quote the same wikipedia article,
"In September 2009, AMD announced the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series video cards which features support for HDMI 1.3 output (Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit rate audio), support for 8-channel LPCM over HDMI, and an integrated HD audio controller with a Protected Audio Path that allows bitstream output over HDMI for AAC, Dolby AC-3, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS Master Audio formats.[138][139][140] The ATI Radeon HD 5870 released in September 2009 is the first video card that supports bitstream output over HDMI for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio." So maybe the 4870, unlike the newer bad to the bone 5870, is missing this very upgrade...

So Martin, Ultimately what I did was stop using HDMI and switch over to the DVI connection. The DVI connection works perfectly. I liked HDMI, because it included audio. I had to run audio separately to the monitor when I switched to DVI.

If you bought the same video card and monitor you should have this option (I hope). HDMI would have been sexier, but I gave up on it after the hours kept disappearing into the HDMI incompatibility abyss.

In conclusion, I recommend switching to DVI.

I hope this helps,
Kyle

P.S. If you have the wherewithal I would suggest an experiment to at least isolate the source(s) of the problem. I could not do this, because all I own is my PC and monitor. If you have a blu-ray player or some game machine with HDMI out, see if the monitor properly displays its contents. On the flip side, if you have an HDTV with HDMI in, see if your PC properly displays its output on the TV.

Four possibilities could occur. If one works and the other doesn't, then at least you know where the problem is coming from. If both don't work (I'd be surprised for some reason) that would really be lame and the findings inconclusive. If both work that is awesome, but this would only deepen the mystery as to why the monitor and PC aren't compatible on HDMI. If you do this please post back. Goodluck.

Message edited by NoTraction on 12-11-2009 at 03:18:37 AM

Reply to NoTraction

Use the DVI connection. Essentially it is the same thing without the audio, But since the h233h has no speakers on it, why waste it?

I have absolutely no p roblems running 260's with mine at 1920x1080 on DVI, but i had a crap load of trouble on HDMI... sooo...

------------------------------ Dont worry, the dark lord of the cookie has a present for you....
Reply to lilotimz

I just purchased the H233H also, and had the same blk border around my screen using hdmi. I changed the refresh rate from 59 to 60 hertz in the advance settings for screen resolution. I am using Windows 7. This fixed my problem. It is kinda sad that you can not go to Acer to get the answer for this problem. I am using an ATI X1200 integrated motherboard graphics card running at 1920 x 1080.

Message edited by vannessa99 on 12-12-2009 at 07:45:37 PM

Reply to vannessa99

I just went through this myself with an Acer P235H. The problem has nothing to do with Acer, and everything to do with ATI. You see, ATI assumes that you'll use your HDMI cable to hook up to a TV. Since most TVs are configured with overscan (i.e. the edges of the broadcasted image don't appear), ATI aggressively defaults to shrinking the image by 15% when using HDMI to ensure that the entire desktop will be visible.

The solution is to install the ATI Catalyst Control Center, available from their website. There's a section called something like "desktops & displays." On the bottom of that tab will be an area with a small icon of a monitor. Right click on that and select "Configure..." One of the tabs that shows up has a slider for display scaling. Move the slider to 0%, and voila!

It was for my wife's computer. I had already promised to reduce the cable clutter by having a single thin cable for both audio and video, so not getting HDMI working would have entailed a serious loss of face.

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by SunriseMan on 12-16-2009 at 04:43:30 PM

Reply to SunriseMan

I experienced a similar issue with my Acer S243HL which I'll share. The 1920x1080 native rez appeared "overscanned" so I thought maybe it needed adjustment. But when I changed the overscan setting the images on screen appeared fuzzy and out of focus. I then stumbled onto a setting in Catalyst (AMD HD5870 on CCC 9.11) detailing colorspaces, which I found odd. It stated my monitor supported multiple colorspace settings. I chose a new one, the 4:4:4 Standard PC (I think, mess around with them and see) and it fixed the issue. Perfectly sized sharp desktop at 1920x1080.

I love the Acer monitor, but I am having Bluray issues between it, my vid card, and Cyberlink. Not sure why.

Reply to maestro73

SunriseMan wrote :

I just went through this myself with an Acer P235H. The problem has nothing to do with Acer, and everything to do with ATI. You see, ATI assumes that you'll use your HDMI cable to hook up to a TV. Since most TVs are configured with overscan (i.e. the edges of the broadcasted image don't appear), ATI aggressively defaults to shrinking the image by 15% when using HDMI to ensure that the entire desktop will be visible.

The solution is to install the ATI Catalyst Control Center, available from their website. There's a section called something like "desktops & displays." On the bottom of that tab will be an area with a small icon of a monitor. Right click on that and select "Configure..." One of the tabs that shows up has a slider for display scaling. Move the slider to 0%, and voila!

It was for my wife's computer. I had already promised to reduce the cable clutter by having a single thin cable for both audio and video, so not getting HDMI working would have entailed a serious loss of face.

Excellent SunriseMan! Took care of my problem!

Reply to marcuslaw

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