Widescreen external monitor on laptop?

September 3, 2006 9:36 PM

Is it possible to drive a widescreen external monitor from a laptop?

Is it possible to drive a widescreen external monitor from a laptop? I am concerned that the resolutions of widescreen monitors (e.g. 1680x1054) will not be supported by the graphics card in my laptop (which is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, in a Thinkpad T42).

On this page (at the bottom) I found a list of supported resolutions:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-57839

But is this list really just about refresh rate, will it actually support other resolutions that are not listed?

Thanks for your help...

posted by tabulem to computers & internet (10 comments total)

1680*1054 is not one of the listed resolutions. It will not support resolutions which are not listed.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:49 PM on September 3, 2006

As long as it has enough vram to drive the external display, there should be no problem.

Is the connection via VGA or DVI?
posted by mphuie at 9:49 PM on September 3, 2006

Probably -- my ibook g3, which had a more pathetic ATI (mobility radeon 7500 I think, 16MB vram) card than yours, could do 1680x1050 serviceably. You may need to update your drivers.
posted by advil at 9:51 PM on September 3, 2006

Do not make assumptions about laptops and widescreen-capability. Everything works in theory and the card should work, but that's not always the case. I've just had a long-running slap-down bitchfight with a Toshiba laptop, which has a bog-standard NVidia chip in it. End result: despite the chip being capable, the Toshy flatly refuses to drive a widescreen external monitor*.

All that being said -- your T42 should be fine. My boss's T42 drives an external Benq monitor at 1680x1050 without blinking. Note, however, that it doesn't do the resolution one step down (which currently slips my mind -- 1440x900, I think).

*It all comes down to drivers. Toshy laptops seem to only work with official Toshy drivers, and fall over in a frothing fit if you try to feed them NVidia drivers. And, in this case, the drivers don't support any widescreen resolutions. Huzzah!
posted by coriolisdave at 10:01 PM on September 3, 2006

I've got a Thinkpad x31 with a radeon 9000 on it. I can drive a resolution of 1440 x 900 on it, even though it wasn't one of the listed resolutionsuntil the monitor was connected to the notebook. As long as you have up to date ATI drivers you should be ok, but check what the return policy is first.
posted by furtive at 10:11 PM on September 3, 2006

thanks a lot for the feedback everyone.

coriolisdave and furtive, do you know if the thinkpads you mention were driving these monitors at their actual native resolution, or was there interpolation, i.e. blurriness, involved?
posted by tabulem at 10:17 PM on September 3, 2006

The thinkpad was definitely driving it at the screen's native resolution -- sexyness ensued.
posted by coriolisdave at 10:51 PM on September 3, 2006

My dell XPS m1210 has no trouble driving a Acer 19" widescreen at 1440x900
posted by Mick at 5:17 AM on September 4, 2006

coriolisdave: native...and fantastic, in fact it was one of the Acer screens that Mick mentions.
posted by furtive at 6:26 AM on September 4, 2006

Also, I've just realized that my girlfriend has a thinkpad R40 that has successfully driven my monitor at the native resolution.
posted by advil at 1:00 PM on September 4, 2006