{"id":9783,"date":"2017-02-15T11:06:54","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T10:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/?p=9783"},"modified":"2017-02-15T11:06:54","modified_gmt":"2017-02-15T10:06:54","slug":"new-screen-and-new-fuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/2017\/02\/15\/new-screen-and-new-fuses\/","title":{"rendered":"New screen and new fuses"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got myself a new 27″ 4K screen to my work setup, a Dell P2715Q<\/a>, and replaced one of my old trusty twenty-four inch friends with it.<\/p>\n

I now work with the “Thinkpad 13″ on the left as my video conference machine (it does nothing else and it runs Windows!), the two mid screens are a 24″ and the new 27” and they are connected to my primary dev machine<\/a> while the rightmost thing is my laptop for when I need to move.<\/p>\n

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Did everything run smoothly? Heck no.<\/p>\n

When I first inserted the 4K screen without modifying anything else in the setup, it was immediately obvious that I really needed to upgrade my graphics card since it didn’t have muscles enough to drive the screen at 4K so the screen would then instead upscale a 1920×1200 image in a slightly blurry fashion. I couldn’t have that!<\/p>\n

New graphics card<\/h2>\n

So when I was out and about later that day I more or less accidentally passed a Webhallen store<\/a>, and I got myself a new card. I wanted to play it easy so I stayed with an AMD processor and went with ASUS Dual-Rx460-O2G<\/a>. The key feature I wanted was to be able to drive one 4K screen and one at 1920×1200, and then I unfortunately had to give up on the ones with only passive cooling and I instead had to pick what sounds like a gaming card. (I hate shopping graphics cards.)\"\"<\/a>As I was about to do surgery on the machine anyway. I checked and noticed that I could add more memory to the motherboard so I bought 16 more GB to a total of 32GB.<\/p>\n

Blow some fuses<\/h2>\n

Later that night, when the house was quiet and dark I shut down my machine, inserted the new card, the new memory DIMMs and powered it back up again.<\/p>\n

At least that was the plan. When I fired it back on, it said clock<\/em> and my lamps around me all got dark and the machine didn’t light up at all. The fuse was blown! Man, wasn’t that totally unexpected?<\/p>\n

I did some further research on what exactly caused the fuse to blow and blew a few more in the process, as I finally restored the former card and removed the memory DIMMs again and it still<\/em> blew the fuse. Puzzled and slightly disappointed I went to bed when I had no more spare fuses.<\/p>\n

I hate leaving the machine dead in parts on the floor with an uncertain future, but what could I do?<\/p>\n

A new PSU<\/h2>\n

Tuesday morning I went to get myself a PSU replacement (Plexgear PS-600 Bronze), and once I had that installed no more fuses blew and I could start the machine again!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I put the new memory back in and I could get into the BIOS config with both screens working with the new card (and it detected 32GB ram just fine). But as soon as I tried to boot Linux, the boot process halted after just 3-4 seconds and seemingly just froze. Hm, I tested a few different kernels and safety mode etc but they all acted like that. Weird!<\/p>\n

BIOS update<\/h2>\n

A little googling on the messages that appeared just before it froze gave me the idea that maybe I should see if there’s an update for my bios available. After all, I’ve never upgraded it and it was a while since I got my motherboard (more than 4 years).<\/p>\n

I found a much updated bios image on ASUS support site, put it on a FAT-formatted USB-drive and I upgraded.<\/p>\n

Now it booted. Of course the error messages I had googled for are still present, and I suppose they were there before too, I just hadn’t put any attention to them when everything was working dandy!<\/p>\n

Displayport vs HDMI<\/h2>\n

I had the wrong idea that I should use the display port to get 4K working, but it just wouldn’t work. DP + DVI just showed up on one screen and I even went as far as trying to download some Ubuntu Linux driver package<\/a> for Radeon RX460 that I found, but of course it failed miserably due to my Debian Unstable having a totally different kernel running and what not.<\/p>\n

In a slightly desperate move (I had now wasted quite a few hours on this and my machine still wasn’t working), I put back the old graphics card – (with DVI + hdmi) only to note that it no longer works like it did (the DVI one didn’t find the correct resolution anymore). Presumably the BIOS upgrade or something shook the balance?<\/p>\n

Back on the new card I booted with DVI + HDMI, leaving DP entirely, and now suddenly both screens worked!<\/p>\n

HiDPI + LoDPI<\/h2>\n

Once I had logged in, I could configure the 4K screen to show at its full 3840×2160 resolution glory. I was back.<\/p>\n

Now I only had to start fiddling with getting the two screens to somehow co-exist next to each other, which is a challenge in its own. The large difference in DPI makes it hard to have one config that works across both screens. Like I usually have terminals on both screens – which font size should I use? And I put browser windows on both screens…<\/p>\n

So far I’ve settled with increasing the font DPI in KDE and I use two different terminal profiles depending on which screen I put the terminal on. Seems to work okayish. Some texts on the 4K screen are still terribly<\/em> small, so I guess it is good that I still have good eye sight!<\/p>\n

24 + 27<\/h2>\n

So is it comfortable to combine a 24″ with a 27″ ? Sure, the size difference really isn’t that notable. The 27 one is really just a few centimeters taller and the differences in width isn’t an inconvenience. The photo below shows how similar they look, size-wise:<\/p>\n

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I got myself a new 27″ 4K screen to my work setup, a Dell P2715Q, and replaced one of my old trusty twenty-four inch friends with it. I now work with the “Thinkpad 13″ on the left as my video conference machine (it does nothing else and it runs Windows!), the two mid screens are … Continue reading New screen and new fuses<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,54],"tags":[461,395,421,460,427],"class_list":["post-9783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","category-work","tag-graphics-card","tag-hardware","tag-linux","tag-screen","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9783"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9798,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9783\/revisions\/9798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}