up until recently I was using the U2711 with a Lenovo T410 via a DP output. This allowed me to use the max resolution of 2560×1440. The U2711 is used as my second extended monitor, my laptop screen is my main display.
I now switched laptops to a new Latitude E6520 (with an Nvidia NVS 4200M graphics card) that does not have a DP output nor a DVI output. I was wondering if the HDMI output would allow me to use the max resolution anyway, either via a custom resolution or a cable adapter.
I already tried setting a custom resolution in the Nvidia control panel to 2560×1440 through HDMI. This seemed to work the first time, but whenever I hook up the monitor now via HDMI, the whole laptop becomes unresponsive and the monitor goes into save mode.
So a couple of questions here:
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Can I use the custom resolution with HDMI? Would this have any negative impact on the monitor's lifetime/performance?
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Can I somehow reset the custom resolution to the native HDMI one in the control panel, as I think this would prevent my laptop from becoming unresponsive?
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As an alternative, is there a cable adapter that I could use to go from HDMI to DP or DVI?
Best Answer
As stated by Dell and confirmed by many users (me included), the HDMI port of the U2711 is passive, meaning it gets whatever the video card sends. It IS possible to run the U2711 at native (full) resolution over the HDMI port, provided that a) your video card supports 2560x1440 over the HDMI port, b) your cable is at least version 1.3 for a higher bandwidth capacity. Check out the HDMI version comparisons on wiki.
Since HDMI is supposed to be used for displaying multimedia video streams, and actual commercial video highest resolution is 1920x1080p, not many cards shows a higher resolution available when choosing, for example in control panel. To be able to use a higher resolution to the one showed it may be necessary to create a custom resolution, or edit some registry/EDID files, depending on your video card and OS.
In my case, with a Intel HD integrated video card, the only necessary thing was to create a custom resolution via the Intel Graphics control panel, reboot, and choose the new resolution from the control panel normally.
Note that altering the default resolutions and files may cause some other problems, like flickering, necessity to lower the refresh rate of the video card, or possibly worse. You should go with extreme care and read first the forums and sites other people suggested before.