Well that was unexpected, HDTV screen blinking with RX 470

[MaxDepth]

So in my HTPC, I had the venerable AMD 6950 cranking away, delivering everything from Paw Patrol to Netflix to Amazon Prime shows and anything from browsing the webs.

I recently bought a new 4K SUHD TV to replace the 54" RCA 1080i rear projection TV. The HTPC screen looked okay but a little washed out and fuzzy with the 1080 size. So I pulled the card and put in Sapphire Nitro+ 470 (470, not the 480) and then updated the drivers.

It looked awesome. Then I get the message "Radeon settings has detected that one or more high dpi panels are connected to your system." And as I go to the settings to see what can be changed, I get screen blanking. It is not steady blinking, it is not regular and it became so hard to try to steer around the screen that I pulled the HDMI from the TV and put it back to a 1080p monitor. It blinked occasionally but no where near as badly with the TV. Also, I noticed overscan with the screens.

I used the AMD clean uninstall program to remove the new drivers. Now with the microsoft generic driver, I get 1080 screen size on my TV and a bit of overscan. I reinstalled the drivers again and got the same issue.

So the one thing I have not tried yet is to replace the HDMI cord. I have a monoprice redmere slimline HDMI and I made sure I had the cord was connected correctly. (The redmere cord I have has a one-way only to connect, one must be source and the other end only for the monitor or end-unit.) I have a new cord and I will try it tonight.

And of course, I looked up overscan with the the new Crimson drivers to see that like a bunch of other people, the old way of correcting overscan is gone. So...I guess I am pinning all my hopes on a new HDMI cable...

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Overscan is not an issue with flat screen TVs, only CRTs and RP TVs. Some 4K TVs may not be able to properly display a 1080P resolution and so parts of it will be cut off, but it's not due to overscan. You need to find out the native resolution and refresh rate of your 4K TV and set the Radeon to that res and refresh (likely either 30Hz or 60Hz). When properly set it should be perfect without any overscan adjustments required.

 

[MaxDepth]

Okay, so I got a new cable. The blinking stopped but I did have an issue with centering the display in 4k. It was off-center to the left by about 20 pixels. I could see the Win10 date and time in the lower right corner but the Windows logo and a small bit of the magnifier glass was off screen. I tried all the settings for Radeon, center etc but none of the selections gave me the correct display. However, when I switched to 1080, I did get full view. I don't know why that is. It is at 60Hz refresh rate as labeled by Samsung.

I do however need to send it back as there is a ripple in the center bottom of the screen.

 

[sdifox]

Overscan is not an issue with flat screen TVs, only CRTs and RP TVs. Some 4K TVs may not be able to properly display a 1080P resolution and so parts of it will be cut off, but it's not due to overscan. You need to find out the native resolution and refresh rate of your 4K TV and set the Radeon to that res and refresh (likely either 30Hz or 60Hz). When properly set it should be perfect without any overscan adjustments required.

Panny plasmas were notorious on overscan and you have to get into service mode level 2 to adjust it.

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Panny plasmas were notorious on overscan and you have to get into service mode level 2 to adjust it.

True. But that was like 600 years ago in TV years.

My main TV is still a plasma.

Still waiting for the 4K UHD cement to cure, if you know what I mean.

 

[bigboxes]

Panny plasmas were notorious on overscan and you have to get into service mode level 2 to adjust it.

I have a top of the line Panny plasma with no such issues.

 

[Aikouka]

So the one thing I have not tried yet is to replace the HDMI cord. I have a monoprice redmere slimline HDMI and I made sure I had the cord was connected correctly. (The redmere cord I have has a one-way only to connect, one must be source and the other end only for the monitor or end-unit.) I have a new cord and I will try it tonight.

I also found out the hard way that these don't really work for 4K30. In my case, I thought my HTPC had died on me, but I later found out that my memory module was apparently not seated properly. Strangely enough, that made it work like 99.9% of the time until it finally got dislodged enough to not work. Unfortunately, I didn't really find that out in time before I started replacing things... and oh boy, did I have to replace things!

I replaced that TV, which was a LG 1080p LCD, with a 4K TV about a year ago. It wasn't really an issue that I was using a 4K TV (Vizio M65) with my 1080p receiver (Denon AVR-2112ci), because the end devices were all 1080p. However, once my Ivy Bridge-based HTPC "died", I tossed a Zotac ZBox in there, which supported 4K. The receiver passes the EDID from the TV to the end devices, and once the ZBox saw that the display supported 4K, it chose that. Plugging another monitor in, changing the TV's resolution, and then removing the monitor didn't work as Windows considers that to be two separate configurations, which have their own settings.

So, I ended up buying a receiver that supports 4K (Denon AVR-1300), which after talking with someone, I realized that I probably could've just setup (non-RDP) remote access software, remoted into the HTPC, and set the resolution to 1080p. But let me say... this receiver reminds me of one thing that I hate about Denon... they always allocate some convenience factor in a higher model that doesn't really make sense. I think one of my previous receivers was a Denon 1911 (or 1910), and it couldn't display any GUI elements over 3D video. With the 2016 (and 2017) Denon receivers, you cannot see any GUI elements when outputting in 4K unless you spring for the 3x00 model or above.

Anyway, the Zotac ended up being too slow, so I'm replacing it with a Pentium G4560-based setup. (I had an H110 board not being used.)