I recently bought a few laptop panels online in an attempt to make my own custom monitor and so far I’ve been partially successful but I’m having some strange issues which I believe may be related to the Display Port signalling issue Wendell has mentioned in videos a few times.
I have an AMD 6800XT and I swap between using Windows and Linux. All the panels seem to be detected by both operating systems without issue but when it comes to actually DISPLAYING things on them they’re oddly finicky.
Okay so here it goes.
I have 4 panels
Panel 1: A 15.6" 4k60hz OLED panel from Samsung
This seems to work mostly without issue on Linux (a few black frames from time to time in games) but every time I try to use it on windows it gives me a black screen shortly after I start to see the little spinning boot logo; I presume this is when the video driver is loaded and prior to that the POST/boot screen runs at 1440p.
This one also requires a special eDP cable that it came with which seems to have fewer wires than a regular eDP cable and if I use a regular eDP cable I get what sounds like a quiet “click” from my USB-PD brick and no power draw according to my watt meter so I’m guessing it detects some sort of short with the regular cable and shuts off the power to prevent damage.
DAMN does it ever look stunning when it works BTW, 4k at 15.6" has basically the same PPI as an equivalent 8k 32" monitor.
Panel 2: A 15.6" 4k120hz LCD from AUO
Panel was listed as being supported on the page for the driver board and should work without issue but I don’t get a signal on Windows OR Linux for this one. Originally I thought it was broken directly from the factory but the backlight seems to work fine, I don’t see any visible cracks, and occasionally I’ll see a picture which doesn’t show any damage.
Panel 3: A 15.6" 1080p300hz LCD panel from AUO
Which only goes up to 240hz in both Windows and Linux for no discernible reason.
Panel 4: A 17.3" 1080p360hz LCD panel from AUO
Which works without issue in Windows and Linux, goes up to the full 360hz, and seems to never have any visible issues with dropped frames. Maybe this is just because of the crazy high refresh rate and a single dropped frame being almost invisible at 360hz? I’m not sure.
I’m testing all of these with the same Display Port to eDP driver board I purchased off of Aliexpress.
Originally I would have suspected the driver board to be the issue but the lack of any noticeable issues with the 360hz panel and the odd behaviour when switching OS’s makes me think otherwise.
Has anyone else tried this and had any success? I tried dropping some basic settings like the BPC in the custom resolution settings in an attempt to lower the bandwidth requirements but even at 6BPC I was still having the same issues. Any suggestions on what to try next? I have tried 3 different display port cables, at least 2 of which I trust the quality of, 1 of which came with my 4k144hz monitor and works fine with that so I would hope 4k60 shouldn’t be any trouble for it, 1 came from Bestbuy (least trusted), and 1 came from my 1440p 165hz monitor.
I’m not sure if I should link the pages I purchased the items from here but I can post the model numbers for the items if that’s not against the rules.