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I asked this over as askdifferent, but I thought I'd try here as well.

At my work, a nice big 30" Apple Cinema monitor has just become available. I would really like to use it, but I only have a laptop running Windows 7/Ubuntu 12.04.

The Apple monitor has what appears to me as a male DVI-D, and I assume it's dual link. I tried connecting it the HDMI port on my laptop using a male HDMI to female DVI-D adapter (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=12576408). The apple monitor is recognized under both Windows and Linux, but the maximum resolution is 1200x800.

After reading this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3571, I'm slighty confused whether this a hardware problem due to HDMI or simply a problem with me not tweaking the correct drivers.

My laptop only has vga or hdmi ouput - is it possible to buy an (active?) adapter/converter that would make hooking the screen up possible? Any price level is fine.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I'm on a nvidia geforce gtx 660M 2GB graphics card with nvidia optimus to a smaller Intel HD4600.

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You're out of luck. The monitor's connector is a Dual-link DVI connector, and HDMI (as provided by an adapter)/VGA only carries enough bandwidth for a Single-link DVI connector. Because of this, the total output resolution is limited to 1280x800. Source

(I've actually tried running 2560x1440 over an HDMI connector, and the results are very bad. Flickering horizontal lines and the monitor would lose the connection entirely if I put too many white pixels on the screen (i.e., by dragging a window onto it))

Some of the newer HDMI versions support increased bandwidth (1.3, 1.4, 2.0), but this is unavailable when using a converter to DVI.

If uh... you're not using that nice 30" Apple Cinema display... you could always send it to me. :)

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  • After some additional research I came to same conclusion, but it's very nice to have it confirmed from somebody smarter! I saw some brief mentions of active adapters, that were able to split and amplify the signal from an hdmi-output. Do these mythical creatures really exist? Again, price would be of little matter...
    – Misconstruction
    Commented Sep 17, 2013 at 2:01
  • As far as I can tell, nobody makes an active HDMI 1.4 -> Dual-Link DVI converter. Your best bet is to get a ViDock and separate graphics card, or an active HDMI -> Mini DisplayPort and an active Mini DisplayPort -> Dual-link DVI converter. The first will be about $400-$600, and the second would be even more expensive and I don't even know if it would work.
    – Darth Android
    Commented Sep 17, 2013 at 14:44

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