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PowerEdge 1900 screen interference
There is some odd pink-ish gradient on the top of the screen when I connect the server to an external monitor. It gets worse when I use the rear vga-out. Also, blue/green spots on screen create horizontal lines around them.
Other then that, image is prefectly stable, no artifacts other then weird colors. It seems the interference is dependent on the raw content of the screen - text in BIOS or graphics under OS control makes no difference, neither does display resolution. Either way there's this constant pink gradient overlaid on the top of the screen and some things create horizontal lines around them. The effect doesn't change over time (doesn't get better/worse), swapping the cable between front/rear connectors produces a constant change.
I'm certain my monitor is fine and I'm quite sure the cable I'm using is not to blame either.
I wonder what could be causing that, and more importantly, if its something I should be concerned about ? I don't mind the colors, I'll be logging in remotely anyway. I'll only connect a screen for initial setup and emergencies later. But if symptoms like that indicate the graphics chip is about to die, I'd like to know.
Anonymous
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October 27th, 2011 15:00
Looks like we missed the third option... It turns out everything was working just fine from the start - except when connected together.
PowerEdge 1900 didn't work right with my LCD monitor (Iiyama ple2407), but when connected to my older display (Dell UltraScan P1110) it provided a prefect crisp picure. OTOH, the analog input on my LCD works perfectly when connected to my PC (T7400 workstation, Geforce GTX 560 Ti).
I guess the ATI ES1000 chip used in PE1900 works better with CRT displays.
It wasn't bad though, I've tested it up to 1600x1200 and everything was perfectly readable, just with some funky colors.
DELL-Steve R
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October 27th, 2011 07:00
Hi, if you are seeing the issue outside of the operating system and you have 100% ruled out the monitor and cable by swapping them with known working ones, it will be the on-board GPU that is causing the colour distortion. If this is the case you will need a motherboard replacement to fix your issue, is your system still in warranty?
Steve
theflash1932
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October 27th, 2011 15:00
It works just fine with LCD's too, but you just have to watch the resolution/refresh/bit-level ... on many servers 1600x1200 isn't even possible without dropping the color down to 16- or 24-bit.
Anonymous
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October 27th, 2011 17:00
Apparently it doesn't play nice with some LCDs. I'll test it with some other screens, if I can get my hands on any.
Resolution/BPP settings had nothing to do with the distorted colours, they occurred in BIOS and on every livecd I ran, regardless of the display settings/drivers.
What added to my confusion was that the level of distortion was different on front/rear connectors and that the change was constant (bad connector/cable would produce varied results). Actually, swapping the cable was the only thing that had any effect on the problem. Both outputs work perfectly with the CRT. Now I'm starting to suspect that either my LCD monitor has borderline crap analog input or the server is supplying bad(and worse on the rear connector) quality signal, maybe just bad enough to confuse some modern displays.
What's important to me is that there seems to be no hardware damage in this case, just an incompatible screen - which I don't mind, I'll just use something else. Probably the P1110 since I'm not looking forward to carrying it back any time soon, that thing is heavy !