Intel GMA 950 Widescreen Resolution Foibles

28Oct07

*FIXED*

     After an exausting search for an answer to the matter of why my brand new 19″ widescreen monitor’s native resolution (1440×900) was unavailible in the display properties, I finally stumbled upon an article a person posted on Intel’s forums that basically explained what shannanigans Intel had been up to with their GMA 950 line of onboard graphic solutions. Mind you the 950 line encompasses many 9xx Intel GMA model numbers like 946GZ,945GM.. Additionally, this work-around is applicable to to many other Intel GMA lines like X3000 etc. As far as I know this solution applies to XP and Vista alike.

     You can read about it in detail here if you want:(wiki)

     Now don’t get me wrong, the man writes beautifully, but never the less it’s a very important but nerdy problem; So here is a quick rundown of what you need to do if your monitor’s native resolution is always or even sporadically unavailible in the display properties

1) Download a small program named MonInfo from the fine people at EnTech Taiwan: Here

2)Run MonInfo it will give you a read out of the data your monitor sends the display adapter (IE GMA 950) to tell it what it’s resolution capabilities are.

3) Select and Copy the info shown in PINK (Later if want more unlisted resolutions you may use PURPLE,BLUE, and ORANGE; just keep substituting)

*

4) Next find the appropriate version of the drivers and open up the .INF (driver file) in Notepad

Intel GMA drivers are availible for download here  or better yet  from the computer’s manufacturer.

Example: 

XP: igxp32.inf

Vista 32: igdlh.inf **

Vista 64: igdlh64.inf

**Should be stored in the Graphics folder in the video driver’s folder

5) In Notepad, find the first entry that closely resembles this

HKR,, DTD_1,%REG_BINARY%, 01,1D,80,18,71,1C,16,20,58,2C,1A,00,00,00,00,00,00,86,37,01 ;1920×1080@60…Interlaced

6) Delete all the numbers except the last two which happen to be 37 and 01 in this case, and substitute and it with the info you got from MonInfo earlier so it looks something like this

HKR,, DTD_1,%REG_BINARY%, 30,2A,00,98,51,00,2A,40,30,70,13,00,78,2D,11,00,00,1E,37,01 ;1920×1080@60…Interlaced

7)  Above what you just edited should be a string that looks like this
“HKR,, TotalDTDCount, %REG_DWORD%, 0″ Change the 0 to 4 so it looks like this

“HKR,, TotalDTDCount, %REG_DWORD%, 4″

Finally save the file (overwriting the existing) and run the driver setup
Hope this helps you poor fools, if you need/want more info on this subject and want to know the whys for the steps refer back to Archibael’s article mentioned above.

I’ll be posting a tutorial video later.

Filed under: Troubleshooting   |  6 Comments
Tags: gma, gma 950, intel, resolution, widescreen