Video card woes, DVI cables

The refurb Sapphire Radeon 9200 card arrived yesterday. The card seems to work fine, as far as I can tell. Software is a different matter.

The X server in Fedora Core 3 (xorg-x11-6.8.1-12) recognizes the card and is willing to use it just fine in 8-bit color at resolutions up to 1600×1200. But in 16-bit or 24-bit mode, it doesn’t work correctly at any resolution. Attempting to use it at 1600×1200 in either 16-bit or 24-bit results in a 1600×1200 display, of which the bottom 3/4 of the display is whatever was leftover in the frame buffer, and the top 1/4 appears to be the stuff that is supposed to be displayed, but in 8-bit mode such that the card is displaying it in funny strips. And at that point the keyboard locks up, though the USB mouse still tracks. I have to reboot.

I thought it might be a bug fixed in later Fedora Core 3 errata, but xorg-x11-6.8.2-1.FC3.13 does the same thing.

There is no sign of any bugs filed about it in Red Hat Bugzilla.

I’ll probably try Fedora Core 4 test 2 tonight and see if it’s any better. If not, I bought a Sapphire Radeon 9550 card to try, though I’d rather stick to the 9200 since that was the last ATI chip to have open source 3D support. (Not that I use 3D at all.)

The Samsung LCD came with a six foot DVI cable, but the way I have the computer positioned I need a slightly longer cable, so yesterday I bought a “DVI Dual-link Digital + Analog” ten foot cable. Turns out that I can’t use it; the monitor’s DVI jack won’t accept the keying and pins for the analog part. Apparently I need a DVI Dual-link Digital cable without analog, so I bought one of those today. These DVI cables are a lot more complicated than they should be.

A friend gave me a Monster Cable DVI400 “High Bandwidth All Digital Video Interface with Gas-Injected Dielectric for Highest Quality HDTV Picture” 6-foot DVI cable a few weeks back. It has a $99 Fry’s tag. I don’t ever buy Monster Cable myself, as I think it’s just grossly overpriced snake oil. That’s especially true for DVI cables; the back of the packaging shows two images that they claim are with their DVI cable and some other DVI cable, with muted colors on the other one. I don’t believe that for a minute; in fact I think it’s probably completely fraudulent. Unlike analog signals, the digital signals are either going to work correctly, or they’re going to cause much worse problems than muting colors. Anyhow, the cable apparently isn’t useful with the Samsung LCD monitor since it’s only a single-link cable.