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Problem

When I try to connect the monitor to the portable through a Displayport cable, the monitor immediately starts flickering. Sometimes it even turns black for a few seconds. When I try the same with the VGA cable, everything works flawlessly. I'm almost sure the problem is caused by the graphics card, and the problem does occur on both linux and Windows.

Attempts to solve it

On linux, I tried to play around with both aticonfig and xrandr. When I execute the command: aticonfig --od-enable (enabling AMD overdrive) right before attaching the monitor to the portable, the monitor works. But if I then try to open a mp4 file in VLC, the monitor starts acting weird again. If I first open the same movie and then attach the monitor, everything works. Because I think the problem has something to do with the refresh rate, but I can not fix it.

On Windows, I only managed to get the monitor working in a lower resolution.

Setup

Dell XPS 1640 portable with ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics card (1GB)

Dell U2312HM external monitor (1920x1080)

Linux Mint / Windows 7

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    Sorry I can't help, but this is question is very well worded. +1
    – Dave
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 13:12
  • Have you hooked up the display port connection to a different computer? I suspect the port on the monitor is bad. XPS is a relative high quality product line, while the port could be bad on it, I suspect either the cable or the port on the monitor.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 16:26
  • I haven't had the opportunity to connect the monitor to another computer yet. I really do believe it is driver/graphics card issue because of the fact that everything works when the monitor is hooked up after the AMD overdrive is enabled and a movie is playing.
    – Jeroen
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 16:41
  • UPDATE: I recently got the chance to hook up my laptop to another Dell monitor (20 inch), and the monitor showed the same symptoms.
    – Jeroen
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 22:18

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Seems like bug in graphic driver. On Linux you can also try open source drivers. Open source drivers have different code, so it's chance this bug is already fixed or not present.

In case it won't start work, there are two option:

  1. your Radeon HD 4670 is broken
  2. flickering bug is also in open source driver, then fill bug report on https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ with detailed description of your problem
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Old question, but as stated here, flickering can be caused by a low-quality cable. Did you try another cable?

And on my HD7870 flickering was caused by ANY form of graphics card overclocking: volt mod, GPU core freq increase decrease or GPU mem increase/decrease. Leave everything at default.

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