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6. Basic Things to Know about your Display and Adapter

There are some fundamental things you need to know before hacking an Xconfig entry. These are:

6.1. The monitor sync frequencies

The horizontal sync frequency is just the number of times per second the monitor can write a horizontal scan line; it is the single most important statistic about your monitor. The vertical sync frequency is the number of times per second the monitor can traverse its beam vertically.

Sync frequencies are usually listed on the specifications page of your monitor manual. The vertical sync frequency number is typically calibrated in Hz (cycles per second), the horizontal one in KHz (kilocycles per second). The usual ranges are between 50 and 150Hz vertical, and between 31 and 135KHz horizontal.

If you have a multisync monitor, these frequencies will be given as ranges. Some monitors, especially lower-end ones, have multiple fixed frequencies. These can be configured too, but your options will be severely limited by the built-in monitor characteristics. Choose the highest frequency pair for best resolution. And be careful --- trying to clock a fixed-frequency monitor at a higher speed than it's designed for can easily damage it.

Earlier versions of this guide were pretty cavalier about overdriving multisync monitors, pushing them past their nominal highest vertical sync frequency in order to get better performance. We have since had more reasons pointed out to us for caution on this score; we'll cover those under Overdriving Your Monitor below.

6.2. The monitor's video bandwidth

Your monitor's video bandwidth should be included on the manual's spec page. If it's not, look at the monitor's higest rated resolution. As a rule of thumb, here's how to translate these into bandwidth estimates (and thus into rough upper bounds for the dot clock you can use):


  640x480                 25
        800x600                 36
        1024x768                65
        1024x768 interlaced     45
        1280x1024               110
        1600x1200               185

BTW, there's nothing magic about this table; these numbers are just the lowest dot clocks per resolution in the standard XFree86 Modes database (except for the last, which I extrapolated). The bandwidth of your monitor may actually be higher than the minimum needed for its top resolution, so don't be afraid to try a dot clock a few MHz higher.

Also note that bandwidth is seldom an issue for dot clocks under 65MHz or so. With an SVGA card and most hi-res monitors, you can't get anywhere near the limit of your monitor's video bandwidth. The following are examples:


  Brand                           Video Bandwidth
        NEC 4D                          75Mhz
        Nano 907a                       50Mhz
        Nano 9080i                      60Mhz
        Mitsubishi HL6615               110Mhz
        Mitsubishi Diamond Scan         100Mhz
        IDEK MF-5117                    65Mhz
        IOCOMM Thinksync-17 CM-7126     136Mhz
        HP D1188A                       100Mhz
        Philips SC-17AS                 110Mhz
        Swan SW617                      85Mhz
        Viewsonic 21PS                  185Mhz
        PanaSync/Pro P21                220Mhz

Even low-end monitors usually aren't terribly bandwidth-constrained for their rated resolutions. The NEC Multisync II makes a good example --- it can't even display 800x600 per its spec. It can only display 800x560. For such low resolutions you don't need high dot clocks or a lot of bandwidth; probably the best you can do is 32Mhz or 36Mhz, both of them are still not too far from the monitor's rated video bandwidth of 30Mhz.

At these two driving frequencies, your screen image may not be as sharp as it should be, but definitely of tolerable quality. Of course it would be nicer if NEC Multisync II had a video bandwidth higher than, say, 36Mhz. But this is not critical for common tasks like text editing, as long as the difference is not so significant as to cause severe image distortion (your eyes would tell you right away if this were so).

6.3. The card's dot clock

Your video adapter manual's spec page will usually give you the card's maximum dot clock (that is, the total number of pixels per second it can write to the screen).

If you don't have this information, the X server will get it for you. Recent versions of the X servers all support a --probeonly option that prints out this information and exits without actually starting up X or changing the video mode.

If you don't have -probeonly, don't depair. Even if your X locks up your monitor, it will emit a line of clock and other info to standard error. If you redirect this to a file, it should be saved even if you have to reboot to get your console back.

The probe result or startup message should look something like one of the following examples:

If you're using XFree86:


Xconfig: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/Xconfig
(**) Mouse: type: MouseMan, device: /dev/ttyS1, baudrate: 9600
Warning: The directory "/usr/andrew/X11fonts" does not exist.
         Entry deleted from font path.
(**) FontPath set to "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/,/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
(--) S3: card type: 386/486 localbus
(--) S3: chipset:   924
    Chipset -- this is the exact chip type; an early mask of the 86C911

(--) S3: chipset driver: s3_generic
(--) S3: videoram:  1024k
         Size of on-board frame-buffer RAM

(**) S3: clocks:  25.00  28.00  40.00   3.00  50.00  77.00  36.00  45.00
(**) S3: clocks:   0.00   0.00  79.00  31.00  94.00  65.00  75.00  71.00
                              Possible driving frequencies in MHz

(--) S3: Maximum allowed dot-clock: 110MHz
(**) S3: Mode "1024x768": mode clock =  79.000, clock used =  79.000
(--) S3: Virtual resolution set to 1024x768
(--) S3: Using a banksize of 64k, line width of 1024
(--) S3: Pixmap cache:
(--) S3: Using 2 128-pixel 4 64-pixel and 8 32-pixel slots
(--) S3: Using 8 pages of 768x255 for font caching

If you're using SGCS or X/Inside X:


WGA: 86C911 (mem: 1024k clocks: 25 28 40 3 50 77 36 45 0 0 79 31 94 65 75 71)
 |     |            |                 Possible driving frequencies in MHz
 |     |            +-- Size of on-board frame-buffer RAM
 |     +-- Chip type
 +-- Server type

Note: do this with your machine unloaded (if at all possible). Because X is an application, its timing loops can collide with disk activity, rendering the numbers above inaccurate. Do it several times and watch for the numbers to stabilize; if they don't, start killing processes until they do. Your mouse daemon process, if you have one, is particularly likely to trip you up (that's gpm for Linux users, mousemgr for SVr4 users).

In order to avoid the clock-probe inaccuracy, you should clip out the clock timings and put them in your Xconfig as the value of the Clocks property --- this suppresses the timing loop and gives X an exact list of the clock values it can try. Using the data from the example above:

        Clocks  25 28 40 3 50 77 36 45 0 0 79 31 94 65 75 71

On systems with a highly variable load, this may help you avoid mysterious X startup failures. It's possible for X to come up, get its timings wrong due to system load, and then not be able to find a matching dot clock in its config database --- or find the wrong one!

6.4. What these basic statistics control

The sync frequency ranges of your monitor, together with your video adapter's dot clock, determine the ultimate resolution that you can use. But it's up to the driver to tap the potential of your hardware. A superior hardware combination without an equally competent device driver is a waste of money. On the other hand, with a versatile device driver but less capable hardware, you can push the hardware a little beyond its rated performance. This is the design philosophy of XFree86.

You should match the dot clock you use to the monitor's video bandwidth. There's a lot of give here, though --- some monitors can run as much as 30% over their nominal bandwidth. The risks here have to do with exceeding the monitor's rated vertical-sync frequency; we'll discuss them in detail below.

Knowing the bandwidth will enable you to make more intelligent choices between possible configurations. It may affect your display's visual quality (especially sharpness for fine details).