Alignment

I switched from a GPU to the integrated GPU and now not all the pixels on my screen are getting used. I'm at the right resolution but there are black bars on all four sides of the picture. I can't stretch the image (although I shouldn't have to; it's at 1080p and my monitor is only 1080p...)

What cable are you using to connect ?

DVI -> HDMI. dvi at pc, hdmi at screen.

Why don't you use your 8400GS??

Had enough of the noisy fan - using it now but it is a lot noisier, and I don't game any more anyway.

Why don't you get a quieter heatsink for the card??

A second hand VF700 or VF900 would do the job if it can fit the card.

Alternatively perhaps an Arctic Cooling Accelero L2 Pro VGA Cooler would also be worth a look at:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?W...source=froogle

Again,you would need to check if it is compatible with your graphics card.

I might just sell it and get something passive tbh.

If you are not gaming the HD5450 looks a good choice especially since it has very low power consumption:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1023-page6.html

There is also the HD6350 which is being released soon:

http://www.nordichardware.com/news/7...n-hd-5450.html

Supposedly it has UVD3 which should mean better video decoding.

The ATI driver has a screen scaling feature for talking to a TV that scales the image, and it sounds like that is kicking in. I had a similar problem talking to my 1080p TV, even after I got the TV to scale 1:1 (TVs usually scale up the image by ~5% is both directions when using hdmi) I then had to find the option in Catalyst to turn off the compensating scaling that it automatically applied. Before adjusting all the scaling I had a black band around the image and nasty looking text & graphics.

That's what I have, I'm back with the 8400GS in now and CCC uninstalled, I really can't be faffed with switching it back now but if i find myself needing to use onboard VGA then I'll try that, thanks mate :)

Bump
OK, so I played about today, exchanged the stock cpu fan with a gentle typhoon and tried to get back to onboard GPU. Trouble is it now won't go further than the splash screen, should I really uninstall the nvidia drivers first and then install CCC before exchanging graphics? Annoying tbh ;x

All sorted; what is it about booting with only 1 DIMM that is so stable? And only DIMM 2?
Scaling advice was spot on! Thanks a lot.

Have you tried updating to the latest BIOS? I had a s939 motherboard way back when that just wouldn't boot with dual channel memory: I updated the BIOS and it's played nicely ever since! I don't know if there's something particularly complicated about making dual-channel memory work properly, but it does seem to crop up fairly frequently.

Oh it's all cool now - I just meant why is it that sometimes you can only boot with 1 dimm when fiddling about.

I have only seen a machine not boot with 2 dimms if either there was a hardware fault (dimm or socket) or as already mentioned the BIOS didn't support the CPU I had bought but worked with 1 DIMM so I re-flashed like that.

Glad you got the scaling sorted though, I'm sure it is a useful feature when it isn't getting in the way :D

When I'm tinkering with hardware it sometimes only boots with 1 DIMM initially, got 2 in now. Seems to be a good thing to check if you can't boot.