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Comment by dawkins | Hacker News Reader

I just bought a 2560x1080px monitor just to discover that there is no way to use it with my laptop. It seems that most laptops are limited to 1920x1080 despite that the graphics card may support higher resolutions.

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If your laptop has a displayport output you should be fine, alternatively try to use dual link DVI if your laptop supports that.

I had a similar problem at work getting my external (27" 2560x1440) monitor working with my laptop (a Sony F-series) running Ubuntu. We solved it by lowering the refresh rate used by the HDMI output. It took quite a bit of tweaking to find the right values, and frankly I've forgotten what most of it meant, but this may help you:

In the "Monitor" section, we defined modelines:

    ModeLine       "2560x1440_33" 164.99 2560 2688 2960 3360 1440 1441 1444 1468 -hsync +vsync
    ModeLine       "2560x1440_30" 146.27 2560 2680 2944 3328 1440 1441 1444 1465 -hsync +vsync

Then, in the Screen section, I appear to have modes selected from there:

    Option         "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+360, DFP-1: 2560x1440_33 +1920+0; # ... and a bunch more that seem to be auto-generated by nvidia-settings?

The down side of this is that I can't connect my laptop to use any of our projectors in on conference rooms, but it's a small price to pay in order to be able to drive the larger screen.

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