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Problem
When I try to connect the monitor to the portable through a Displayport cable, the monitor immediately starts flickering. Sometimes it even turns black for a few seconds. When I try the same with the VGA cable, everything works flawlessly. I'm almost sure the problem is caused by the graphics card, and the problem does occur on both linux and Windows.
Attempts to solve it
On linux, I tried to play around with both aticonfig and xrandr. When I execute the command: aticonfig --od-enable (enabling AMD overdrive) right before attaching the monitor to the portable, the monitor works. But if I then try to open a mp4 file in VLC, the monitor starts acting weird again. If I first open the same movie and then attach the monitor, everything works. Because I think the problem has something to do with the refresh rate, but I can not fix it.
On Windows, I only managed to get the monitor working in a lower resolution.
Setup
Dell XPS 1640 portable with ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics card (1GB)
Dell U2312HM external monitor (1920x1080)
Linux Mint / Windows 7
Jeroen
Posted 2013-09-18T12:51:14.157
Reputation: 31
Sorry I can't help, but this is question is very well worded. +1 – Dave – 2013-09-18T13:12:25.700
Have you hooked up the display port connection to a different computer? I suspect the port on the monitor is bad. XPS is a relative high quality product line, while the port could be bad on it, I suspect either the cable or the port on the monitor. – Ramhound – 2013-09-18T16:26:32.147
I haven't had the opportunity to connect the monitor to another computer yet. I really do believe it is driver/graphics card issue because of the fact that everything works when the monitor is hooked up after the AMD overdrive is enabled and a movie is playing. – Jeroen – 2013-09-18T16:41:06.863
UPDATE: I recently got the chance to hook up my laptop to another Dell monitor (20 inch), and the monitor showed the same symptoms. – Jeroen – 2013-09-29T22:18:52.187