ATI and HDTV problems

Hi, yesterday I bought an Sapphire HD4870 Vapor-X card. I have samsung 32" LCD FullHD TV I'd like to use. Model number LE32A559. I have used it previously with GeForce 8800GTS and 9600GT SLI'd. I had them hooked up with standard DVI-VGA cable. The TV has only VGA and HDMI, so I thought HDMI would be the way to go with the new gpu.

I have a 10€ 1m long HDMI cable, so it's not the best one, but I tested this with other cables too always with identical results. Now I'm stuck with weird shadows on some color combinations. Yellow on white background has like 5px wide yellow drop shadow under it, makes reading text really hard.


This image probably looks ok on your screen, but I can see pretty big drop shadow on it.

Also red on almost any background is barely readable.



Like the text was saved with 15% jpg quality. It wasn't even this good when I first plugged the HDMI cable. At first ATI drivers underscanned the desktop about 15% so I was left with black bars on every side. After finally setting the TV to "Just scan" picture mode and moving the underscan slider all the way to 0% I achieved the correct looking resolution. After that I have played with every setting I can find from the menus to correct this color shadow thingy. Couldn't find it. So I thought I'll abandon the HDMI and go back to VGA.

But problems there too. If I just plug the DVI - VGA to the screen and gpu I get "Mode now supported" message, or out of range or anything you'd like to call it. So I set the resolution to 720p via VNC and can see something again. Now, if I set the resolution to any other than FHD I can see the picture, but not at a good quality because it's not the native resolution. I have tried every refresh rate I can think of but 1080p just doesn't work. Theres this weird problem too, that if I apply a refresh rate from the ccc it just snaps back to 60, but if I go see from the windows's settings it's changed. I don't know which one to trust. What's even more weird is that I found a weird go-around. If I set the resolution to 1770 x 1000, I can see the picture, and the up it to 1080p it works! But just as long as some game changes the resolution or just "flickers" the screen to apply it's renderer I go back to Mode not supported. Also rebooting causes it. I have tested multiple cables, VGA - VGA, VGA - VGA with DVI adapter, VGA - DVI, nothing works correctly. Only cable I can get the 1770 x 1000 resolution available is the DVI - VGA, and then I have to have the HDMI cable plugged in too for the resolution to appear. Every cable reports different resolutions available.

I suspect that the HDMI problem is caused by some picture "enhancer" in the TV, it does the same thing on PS3 browser too. If anyone knows a setting to get rid of it, I'd really like to know.

As for the VGA problem I think it has something to do with timings etc, but I can't find any settings from the ati ccc. Neither can I find a way to add custom resolutions. The ccc is from hell, they did the same thing, or even worse that nvidia did about a year ago.

I have tried the vga resolutions from my laptop and there's no problem so I'm pretty sure it's a driver, resolution or some issue on my computer.


I'd like to hear some suggestions to make this work.

EDIT:

Here's the full specs cause I know some1 will eventually ask them anyway.

Windows 7 RC 7100
Athlon 7750BE
M2N SLI-Deluxe
600w PSU, non branded
4870 2GB Vapor-X
4gb of DDR2 800, 1gb sticks