Soyo Topaz S - Hacking Native Widescreen Resolution on an Intel 945GM Express

May 10, 2008 on 12:31 am | In Uncategorized |

This evening started out disappointing, but here lies the key to a simple, relatively safe hack that helped me. I’ll start at the beginning…

I was so stoked today when my new 24″ monitor came in! A Soyo 24″ Widescreen 1920×1200! Nothing fancy of course, but it was a whopping $200 at geeks.com. First thing that happened was I plugged it in to the external monitor slot on my home laptop - a Dell XPS M1210.

It came right on, but hmmm… I couldn’t set anything but 1024×768 resolution! WTF!?!

I tried everything, tweaking the registry settings, hacking the inf file, installed PowerStrip… nothing worked.

I searched google one last time hoping to turn something up before I was going to just return the damned thing. Lo and behold I stumbled on this:

http://www.ryosa.com/widescreendrivers.html

That link explains how to use the Intel Embedded driver development kit to create custom drivers. I know it sounds daunting, but really, it’s simple. They have a wizard for the whole thing.

A quick run through the instructions at the above link, and I had it all working. I also used the linux documentation project to find the Modeline for the monitor, which is a good key to use to figure out what the timers should be. In case you happen to be using this exact same Soyo Topaz S 1920 x 1200 on an Intel 945GM Express chipset, then you’ll want the following settings:

I’d have really liked to have found that somewhere before digging around. Thanks to the modeline on tldp, it worked on the FIRST TRY of this trick because I had the right numbers. It’s beautiful, and I’m happy! YAY! Hopefully this helps at least one other person out of a jam. I’m just contributing to the massive store of knowledge google can bring to you and your kin by posting this. Feel free to ignore it if has nothing to do with you, your laptop, or your monitor.