May 16, 2019

A 43 inch 4k monitor

I thought about this for over a year. Finally in August of 2020, I placed the order. The following link is what I put together when pondering the decision. I ended up buying a Dell U4320Q. It arrived 8-31-2020.

The PC I am using it on is now almost 8 years old. It is a Socket 1155 motherboard with a Z77 chipset. I have been using the graphics in the Intel i7 processor, but that will only go to 2560 by 1440.

So I bought an MSI video card -- a GeForce GT 1030 Nvidia card. This has a big passive heat sink (no fan) and has both an HDMI and a display port. I am using the display port. It is now giving me 3840 by 2160 at 60 Hz.

BIOS issues

First I tried the simple thing, I just connected the new monitor to my current setup. It worked fine, but as expected, the integrated graphics is only giving me 2560 by 1440.

So, next I plugged in the GeForce 1030 card, connected the cable and fired it up. I got the BIOS flash screen, but the keyboard did not work. Neither did the system boot. Some searching suggests that I should try a BIOS upgrade.

I am running the F4 bios, dated 4-23-2012. The latest thing on the Gigabyte site is an F7 bios, dated 8-23-2012. I download that and get an ".exe" file, so I use my Windows system to expand it and put the 3 files in yields onto a flash stick. I really only need one of them: G1SNIPER.F7. It is an 8M file.

I put the stick into a USB drive on my computer and reboot (the BIOS doesn't know you inserted the drive, you have to reboot). Then I select Q-flash utility in the BIOS screen on the upper right, navigate to my flash drive, find the G1SNIPER.F7 file and it flashes the BIOS. This fixes the problem.

While I am at it, I install a new CR2032 coin cell and fiddle with BIOS settings. I let it set the default "optimized defaults" and then find it necessary to tweak just one setting. I have a SATA SSD (Samsung), and it does not see it until I change the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE. After this, it sees the SSD, boot up Linux (Fedora 32) and I am up and running and typing all of this.

Xwininfo verifies that I am runing 3840 by 2160.

My cables are short. I need some kind of stand to lift up my tower case. This will call for some woodworking unless I just want to put it on cement blocks or something.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!