What Kind of External Monitor Can an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 Support?

July 26, 2009 3:21 PM

I have a six-year-old Dell Latitude D600 laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 GPU. I know it's an old machine and an old graphics chip, but I'd like to consider getting an external monitor. What are my options, if any?

I've had a hell of a time trying to find the specs for the Mobility Radeon 9000 online, and Dell was useless on the phone. I found this earlier question, but it refers to an IBM laptop and I don't want to make any assumptions.

So I emailed ATI (their Mobility Radeon 9000 webpage didn't seem to have what I was looking for), and they were pretty helpful. This is what they said:

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NOTE: Possible resolutions for an external monitor by VGA connection based on the OEM driver installed onto your notebook system and the monitor resolutions supported:

800 x 600 [4:3]
1024 x 768 [4:3]
1280 x 800 [4:3]

1600 x 1200 [4:3] - Conditional
2048 x 1536 [4:3] - Conditional
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So I think my questions are:

1) How can I find out if my GPU will support those "conditional" resolutions? ATI says to contact the computer maker, but as I've said, Dell has been useless. They also suggested using a program called PowerStrip, but I'll be honest - I haven't figured out how to use it. Tips on PowerStrip or any other utility would be greatly appreciated.

2) Since the chip can only support a 4:3 aspect ratio, and most modern widescreens use 16:9 or 16:10, am I basically out of luck? Or can you still generally buy 4:3 LCD monitors?

If it makes any difference, I have my laptop plugged into a docking station which has a DVI port, as well as a regular monitor port. (The computer itself only has the regular monitor port.) I also currently have the Radeon Omega drivers installed.

And just to toss it in - if you think I can, in fact, run those higher resolutions, and can also find an old-school 4:3 monitor, do you have any particular monitor recommendations? Thanks for any assistance.

P.S. While a newer computer would probably solve all of these problems, I am not yet ready to scrap this one and upgrade. This system is old but it works just fine for my needs (this one potential issue aside).

posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Non widescreen monitors - Newegg

Generally any video card with more than 8MB of vram will run 1600x1200 with no problem.
posted by wongcorgi at 4:23 PM on July 26

Thanks for the link, wong. The card has 32mb of RAM.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 4:26 PM on July 26

I would go ahead and purchase a nice, widescreen monitor.

Partially because that's about all you can buy at this point. Look at New Egg or Deal News for good prices.

You'll need a display with a VGA input. You could also consider getting a wide aspect ratio monitor that has the same native height in pixels as one of the supported resolutions.

So, a 1366x768 display, or a 1920x1200 display, for example.

Further, sometimes these sorts of specs are somewhat useless, and the ACTUAL resolutions the display driver will support maybe be different.

Finally, get the the display somewhere you'd be able to return it easily if it doesn't work out. Costco is a good choice, for example.

Using a nice big external monitor with a laptop is a great way to make the computer more useful, and you more productive.
posted by jerwood at 4:27 PM on July 26

Jerwood, what would the display look like since the GPU apparently can't handle widescreen aspect ratios? Would there be black bars on the sides? Or would it try to stretch in an awkward way? (And what about the fact that I wouldn't be running in a native resolution - would that look bad?)

Also, I think I can probably use DVI thanks to my docking station. Is there a reason to stick with VGA, though? Thanks for the help.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 4:32 PM on July 26

Just stretch in an awkward way.

There are third-party drivers for ATI cards called Omega Drivers. If your OEM drivers can do the resolution you like then try them.
posted by damn dirty ape at 5:58 PM on July 26

I had a D600 that just got retired a few months ago with that same chip. It was hooked up to a docking station and powered dual monitors--one through the VGA and one via DVI. One was 1024 x 768 and one was 1600 x 1200--no problems. You can get monitors displaying these resolutions from many places, but I would look at Dell--they are really high quality panels (somebody told me that they were the same panels that Apple uses) and are really reasonably priced.

Before I got my current dual screen setup, I had a 19" widescreen panel that ran 1440x900 and it seems to me like the D600 handled the resolution just fine, but that was awhile ago so I can't swear by it. 2nd using Omega drivers--they always worked well.
posted by jtfowl0 at 6:15 PM on July 26

Jtfowl, thanks for the very helpful answer. What size were the monitors you were using in your dual-screen setup with the D600?

(I am already using the Omega drivers.)
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 6:27 PM on July 26

I have a hp pavillion zv5000 series which came with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP video card and when my other pc crashed I ran my 21" viewsonic monitor on my laptop for about a month. Anything higher than 1024X768 you are looking at major adjustments on both your laptop and monitor. When I tried to run the resolution at 1600X1200 it took me about 20-30min of trial and error to get it to look the way I wanted. You won't get the black bars on the sides or stretching problems but the screen will be off center in most cases and the aspect ratio will be bigger than normal. It will take some adjustments but it will work. I don't know if the docking station will help that but it doesn't hurt to try. As suggested before any non wide screen monitor should do just fine.
posted by Plug1 at 6:42 PM on July 26

If you buy a 1920x1200 monitor and find that the GPU doesn't support it, the monitor should have an option to display 1600x1200 without stretching (my Dell 24" can do this, I assume most can). This means you would waste some screen real estate (black bars on the sides), but when you do upgrade your computer you'll have a nicer monitor.

Definitely don't buy a monitor with the expectation of using a non-native resolution in scaled mode, it's a miserable experience.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 7:22 PM on July 26

Follow-up: I bought a Dell S2309W 23" monitor (from Best Buy, because of their 14-day return policy), trying something along the lines of what qxnt suggested. Its maximum resolution is 1920 x 1080, so I thought that might be a further problem, given the fact the nearest vertical size apparently supported by my card is 1200. But 1920 x 1200 monitors are rarer and more expensive, so I thought I'd give it a try anyhow, and return it if it didn't work.

Well, great news. Not only did it work, but I don't even have black bars on the sides! It seems that, at least with the Omega drivers, even an old clunker like the Mobility Radeon 9000 is capable of supporting widescreen formats. And it works in the monitor's native resolution - 1900 x 1080. Things look great. Thanks to all for the help!
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 5:21 PM on August 18

One last detail: I first connected the monitor using the included DVI cable. Even though my laptop doesn't have a DVI port, the docking station it's connected to does. However, using DVI, the screen would simply black out every so often for a few seconds - or even longer if (bizarrely) I tried to access the start menu.

Thinking that perhaps DVI was a bit too much for my old system to handle, I switched to the VGA cable. To my untrained eyes, the screen looks just as good and is no longer suffering from that weird black-out problem.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 8:00 PM on August 18