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DVI won't work from Macbook (But VGA does!)

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  • 15-05-2008 8:41pm
    #1
    jumbo
    Registered Users Posts: 68 ✭✭


    I just got a nice 24" BenQ monitor of Komplett for 350 quid, its a great deal, its getting great reviews and I'm quite happy with it, but as usual, things aren't quite as nice as they could be.

    For some reason, the DVI mode doesn't work. Everything works fine and Dandy when I'm connected with VGA, but it refuses to pick up a signal when I connect through DVI (both the Monitor and mac-Book acknowledge that something is connected, but the Monitor displays a message saying its getting no signal). My flatmate's monitor has a DVI connector, so I tried hooking up to that, and it worked fine. I tried hooking my flat mate's monitor up to my monitor and that worked fine too.

    Having established that both the mac-Book is successfully delivering a video signal to a monitor other than my new one, and the new monitor is receiving and displaying from sources other than the mac-Book I can only presume that there is something peculiar about the BenQ DVI port that prevents it receiving the signal from the mac-Book (perhaps there is some subtle electrical mismatch between the two devices - maybe the mac-Book is a little week for instance, but the BenQ DVI port's tolerances don't stretch to accomodate this). Has anybody ever heard of such a thing? Any other ideas for diagnosis? I have already tried switching cables with no results.

    Working away on the old-style VGA connector for the time being, which seems to be working fine, but I'd really like to be getting some of that digital action on!


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    #2
    Snowbat
    Registered Users Posts: 1,064 ✭✭✭Snowbat


    MacBook with 'Santa Rosa' and a BenQ G2400W ? See http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1340208


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    #3
    Soundman
    Registered Users Posts: 2,593 ✭✭✭Soundman


    Interesting solution to that problem. Doesn't really make much sense though.

    Taken from Snowbat's link:
    newappleuser wrote:
    Ok, I solved the problem.

    I found the problem lies in the "hot plug detect" feature of dvi. What I did I just cut the hot plug pin (see wikipedia:dvi) off the dvi adaptor, isn't it clever? Hah, I wouldn't call it "plug 'n play", but at least it works. Then I connect the dvi to the g2400w and set the monitor "hdmi in", then detect displays from display settings, it'll detect it, and then simply set the monitor to dvi in.


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    #4
    jumbo
    Registered Users Posts: 68 ✭✭jumbo


    Yeah, that kind of worked!

    Had to extract pin-16 from both ends of the DVI cable, then switch the Monitor into HDMI mode before connecting it up to the Mac, and then switching to DVI once connected.

    Now, there was one little problem, doing it this way would only allow me to have my monitor in 'span' mode (i.e. the desktop spanned across both the monitor and the macbook screen), or mirrored (which would only allow me the max resolution of the macbook screen).

    In order to set the Monitor as the (sole) primary screen I had to close the lid of the macbook first (so that it would go to sleep) and then switch the monitor to HDMI mode before plugging it into the macbook. Clicking my external mouse wakes the macbook out of sleep, and when it wakes it sees the external monitor as the only active one. I switch back to DVI and there's my lovely OS-X desktop, in all its 1900x1280, 24", Digital glory !

    Cheers for the Link.

    (P.S. this only worked this morning, and I have been able to switch the monitor on and off a few times and the macbook has slept and it all still works. Hopefully it'll still work after I unplug it and plug it back in again ...)


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