How to disable EDID in Vista - Limited resolution availabilty

[Jameson]

The Problem

EDID is a standard for monitors whereby the manufacturer can program all the refresh rates and resolutions (plus many other features) on a chip which resides on the monitor itself, and can be read by the OS instead of a .inf based monitor driver.

Vista, being the piece of junk it is, strictly forces EDID and there seems to be no way to disable this so that you can use a .inf driver. No matter what monitor driver you install, it will be completely ignored, in it's place the manufacturer written EDID will be used in all circumstances.

Why can this be bad? Well, let's say the driver for your CRT monitor supported 2048 x 1536 in XP (i miss you!), but in EDID it was only programmed to support 1600 x 1200. Well, oh dear, you won't ever get 2048 x 1536 to work now, you'll be hard limited to 1600 x 1200 - thanks Vista...

The Solution

There are no "hacks" availableto disable EDID in Vista like there are in XP. I believe ATI drivers have the option to disable EDID (havent confirmed it working yet) but NVIDIA drivers do not. Below are the only routes you can take, for now at least.

1) You can use a program such as Powerstrip to flash the EDID to one you programmed to support the resolutions or features currently lacking. It's tricky, doesn't work with all monitors, and you need to research what to do.

2) Do the following. Remove the two pins in this diagram. THis isn't easy, as they are small and usually quite well held in place, but it is dooable, because it's what i did.



Now i am able to switch to any resolution right up to 2048 x 1536 on my CRT, including all widescreen resolutions, and i can finally get 800 x 600 @ 140hz for counter-strike again

Really, this is a little known issue, hardly spoken about or recognised, i spent 8 hours hunting down fixes because obviously as a GPU reviewer i need all resolutions at my fingertips, and EDID took the ability away from me.

PS, i hate vista.

[Yblad]

would you recomend staying with xp? im realy torn at the moment.

[Jameson]

the only reasons i can think of to move to Vista, and these are still not brilliant reasons for most users, are:

1) to get DX10

2) to allow the addressing of 4GB+ memory, you'll need the 64 bit version for this. At this stage i would not say this is needed for gamers, only those who really need it (3D modelling, etc).

Using Vista myself now, i can't see any other reason to own it with respects to my own usage patterns.

[Yblad]

well i dont have anouth RAM to justify it, running dx10 would kill my fps on my system so i guess thats answered lol.
how much of a differance does having a 64bit OS make in respects to being able to run my 64bit processor in 64bit mode?

[fuflo]

doesn't winxp64 support 4gb+ ram?
if so, then you can eliminate that reason all together..

[Yblad]

yes but if it comes to a choice between upgrading to a 64bit OS and keeping a 32bit not working rite, then wouldnt it be better to go with vista instead of buying xp64 and then later on having to get vista anyways.

[fuflo]

well i don't talk about buying stuff.. but i guess you've got a point

[Jameson]

the reason i didn't bring up XP64 is that driver support is never going to be good there, it's best to go with Vista as it's a dead cert that things will only get better.

[Jameson]

well i dont have anouth RAM to justify it, running dx10 would kill my fps on my system so i guess thats answered lol.
how much of a differance does having a 64bit OS make in respects to being able to run my 64bit processor in 64bit mode?

DX10 shouldn't harm your fps as you don't have a dx10 card, so it will be working in DX9, and even if you did have a dx10 card, i'm not sure it would equate to a performance hit (over DX9 effects).

[smith]

DX10 shouldn't harm your fps as you don't have a dx10 card, so it will be working in DX9, and even if you did have a dx10 card, i'm not sure it would equate to a performance hit (over DX9 effects).

well from what ive read you get better fps with dx10 (for the same quality) than for dx9... at least in crysis, they say that running medium in dx9 would be the same (fps) as high in dx10.

[Yblad]

interesting.i guess that dx10 could be more streamlined then dx9, they've spent long enough developing it.

[wat]

well from what ive read you get better fps with dx10 (for the same quality) than for dx9... at least in crysis, they say that running medium in dx9 would be the same (fps) as high in dx10.

quite the opposite is true...

[jeffk]

Hello guys,

Which method for VGA cable ?

I have VGA(monitor) to VGA(3d card, GTS 160M).

I have removed pins 12 of VGA, unlock the resolution, but not the freq, wich for the freq ? 13 & 14 ? 5 & 10 ? or 15 ?


Thanks

[wat]

what was i doing posting in this thread...i have no idea what EDID even is lol

[Dougofthenorth]

Anyone know if this EDID issue was passed on to Win7 Pro 64bit ??

[hiddenengine]

Just a quick note to indicate that this works on my system.
I am running Win7 64-bit on a machine that has three monitors - one 1920x1080 via HDMI, one 1280x1024 via DVI and one 1280x1024 via VGA. The VGA output shares a Linksys SVIEW08 (8-port KVM) with 7 other machines.

All worked perfectly with XP but under Win7 whenever I switched back to Win7 on the KVM, Win7 insisted on rescanning all monitors, rearranging my desktop and disabling the VGA output. I had to manually rescan the monitors to restore everything.

Following the above instructions, I bought a XFX DVI to VGA Converter Kit from Ebuyer.com (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/245727) for the princely sum of £2.06 inc VAT. I removed DVI pins 6 & 7 by pulling them hard with a pair of needle-nose pliers and the pins removed cleanly.

I moved the VGA to the unused DVI output on my second video card via this modified adapter and now everything works perfectly - I can switch smoothly between all outputs on my KVM again.

Many thanks to Jameson for the original post.