mycroes

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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Enabling higher resolutions on Matrox G200eW

Recently we bought 5 DELL PowerEdge T110 servers to deploy to customers. After installing Windows XP on the PERC S100 RAID (more on that in a future post) I had to look for a driver for the graphics card. Of course you can't easily find it at Matrox's site, so I went over to DELL support and downloaded the Windows Server 2003 Matrox driver. Server 2003 and XP both being NT5 this worked like a charm, as was to be expected. There is another issue however, by default the Matrox driver supports 4:3 resolutions up to 1280x1024, but we use widescreen monitors which can do 1920x1080, and we're relying on that.

Just a week ago I was fiddling with Matrox drivers for a G450, where I had the same issue with resolutions, where the latest driver did support the correct 16:9 resolutions. When I was comparing the drivers, I noticed there's a resolution reference directly in the driver inf file. For the G200eW, this listed just a few resolutions, but for the G450 there was a long list. Changing this value to what the G450 had listed was enough to get it working, so now our G200eW can do 1920x1080 without issues. Here's the changed value for future reference:
HKR,,Mga.SingleResolutions,0x00000001,\
40,01,C8,00,40,01,F0,00,00,02,80,01,80,02,90,01,\ ; 320x 200, 320x 240, 512x 384, 640x 400
80,02,E0,01,20,03,58,02,50,03,E0,01,58,03,E0,01,\ ; 640x 480, 800x 600, 848x 480, 856x 480
60,03,E0,01,C0,03,60,09,00,04,00,02,00,04,00,03,\ ; 864x 480, 960x2400, 1024x 512, 1024x 768
00,04,00,05,00,04,00,06,30,04,58,02,80,04,60,03,\ ;1024x1280, 1024x1536, 1072x 600, 1152x 864
B0,04,40,06,00,05,D0,02,00,05,00,03,00,05,20,03,\ ;1200x1600, 1280x 720, 1280x 768, 1280x 800
00,05,C0,03,00,05,00,04,00,05,40,06,50,05,00,03,\ ;1280x 960, 1280x1024, 1280x1600, 1360x 768
58,05,00,03,60,05,00,03,78,05,1A,04,A0,05,84,03,\ ;1368x 768, 1376x 768, 1400x1050, 1440x 900
40,06,00,04,40,06,B0,04,40,06,00,05,90,06,1A,04,\ ;1600x1024, 1600x1200, 1600x1280, 1680x1050
00,07,40,05,08,07,A0,05,40,07,70,05,80,07,0A,04,\ ;1792x1344, 1800x1440, 1856x1392, 1920x1034
80,07,38,04,80,07,B0,04,80,07,A0,05,00,08,00,06 ;1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2048x1536

11 reacties:

MajekPL said...

Thanks for this tip. You are great!

My PowerEdge T310 arrived to me today, and of course there is same issue with Matrox G200eW. I made changes in inf files, reinstalled driver, and tomorrow I will check, if it would work (I made changes via remote session, so I cannot change resolution remotely). I hope it would do...

Best regards.

Michael Croes said...

Hi MajekPL,

If you did it properly it'll definately work ;-) I'm amazed by how soon you found this post, it hasn't been around for a long time.
Regards,

Michael

MajekPL said...

Yeah, these guys at Google did pretty good job. ;-)
Actually I was about to put there some GeForce or something, but I Was certain, that there had to be a way to force this card to work with wide screen resolution. I do not have to much to deal with Matrox cards, so your entry helped a lot. I am just wondering how it is with it's performance. Honestly, Windows 2011 GUI in 1280x1024, besides it looks really poorly displayed on wide screen, it works sloooooowly. Maybe it is the reason, why Dell locked resolutions higher than 1280x1024.

Regards,
Bartosz.

McRib said...

hi, I need to do this for my T410 too. where exactly is this driver inf file? Thanks.

MajekPL said...

Two .inf files are located in folder, where your driver installation is unpacked. Where you run setup.exe. You must modify these files, and reinstall driver. I did so, and it worked. If you cant find this folder, just download package from Dell page.

McRib said...

I found the two files in the unpacked setup folders, and I added in your values. I go through the driver re-install, reboot and I still get the same 2 resolutions. 800x600, 1024x768. I've done it several times, but same results. It's driving nuts. This the drivers I'm using MATROX_G200EW-VIDEO-CONTROLL_A02_R231494.exe

MajekPL said...

Maybe you did something wrong.
Here you have these two *.inf files modified by me according to Michael's advice:
http://public.bartech.radom.pl/inf.rar
They do work, because I used them for driver installation on my machine. One thing - I suppose, that they are for 64 bit driver version (x64 in filename). If you are going to use 32 bit system, you will have to modify another files...

McRib said...

I really appreciate your help, but I'm not gonna spend any more time on this. I've done exactly what you did, but still no luck. I am using the 64-bit drivers and I even tried using the two inf files from your rar archive. Restart the machine same 4:3 resolutions.

Thanks for trying.

Foveator said...

The onboard video on these servers have a dedicated 8MB of memory. 8mb!!!

My watch has more than that.

Would it hurt to give the video 512 mb of ram?

You pay thousands of dollars for a well configured flagship server and end up with video that would have been installed on an old 486 machine.

Perhaps video would look much better if you could assign more memory to it.

GY said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
GY said...

Hi, pretty amazing getting that widescreen res :)

you mentioned you were able to install xp on T110, so you actually found the xp-drivers for the PERC/S100?

please let me know if you can help me out with this issue

big.time.fish@gmail.com