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I recently had two of my monitors die on the same day, and as a replacement I bought a new Samsung Syncmaster S23A350H monitor to gain back some of the desktop real estate that I had lost.

While generally happy with the monitor (cheap and cheerful!), it doesn’t have great connectivity options, being limited to VGA and HDMI. I decided to use the HDMI option since I didn’t want to go back to the bad old days of analogue.

I connected up the monitor to my Raedon HD5700 graphics card using a HDMI cable, and found that the image was not filling the screen. I got a image in the centre surrounded by black pixels.

It turns out that the fix is actually quite easy, though it can be a bit of a pain to find if you don’t know where to look. By default the HDMI output from RAEDON cards is scaled down by 15%, and to get the image showing full screen you need to disable this using the following steps:

1. Right click on the Desktop and select the Catalyst Control Centre

2. Select My Digital Flat-Panels from the left hand menu

3. Select Scaling options (Digital Flat-Panel) from the sub menu

4. Select the monitor attached to the HDMI cable from the drop down menu

5. Change the Underscan-Overscan option to the value that will make the image appear full screen – 0% in my case

There you go – you should have now have full screen HDMI output using your ATI graphics card!

27 Comments

  • Kevin S

    Reply
    August 2, 2012at8:57 am

    That was so easy, but I never would have found it -Thanks!

    • Jeff Threet

      Reply
      June 1, 2013at6:18 pm

      So easy, thanks!!!!

  • Matt T

    Reply
    June 4, 2013at7:55 am

    Thank you so much! Just like Kevin said, I never would’ve found it, and would have been completely frustrated.

  • Amit

    Reply
    July 10, 2013at3:03 am

    Thanks a lot. I was using analog cable for last one year until reaching your post.

  • SHL

    Reply
    July 11, 2013at11:14 am

    My Tech guy built my new computer and had no idea how to fix this. Thank you for your blog. It was driving me nuts.

  • Prayag

    Reply
    July 25, 2013at9:24 pm

    Thanks a ton dude. Saved me a lot of stress.

  • Agustin

    Reply
    July 27, 2013at5:25 pm

    Thanks!! I would never have found it myself

  • Carl

    Reply
    August 14, 2013at2:32 pm

    Hello Alex!
    Big and warm THANK to you for your excellent advice and great help! Worked perfectly with my new monitor!
    I would not have find out this by my own!
    Wishing you All the Very Best!

    Carl (Sweden)

  • Jeff S

    Reply
    August 30, 2013at4:40 am

    That was awesome, you are amazing thank you. Can’t believe I didn’t think of that before.

  • Jakey M

    Reply
    September 18, 2013at9:20 am

    Thank you so much! Never would have figured that out.

  • Dean

    Reply
    October 1, 2013at5:30 am

    Thank you!!! 🙂

  • Fran

    Reply
    October 20, 2013at2:49 pm

    Very useful! thanks 🙂

  • November 11, 2013at10:47 am

    Alex,

    Thank you so much for publishing this resolution, it has saved me a lot of time. I purchased some new flat screens for my desk and the HDMI connected screen had the issue you described and I could not work out why. I googled “hdmi connection monitor not full screen” and your very helpful answer was number 2 on Google.
    Anybody who takes the time to publish how they fixed a problem or resolved an issue deserves much appreciation, many thanks, Jonathan

  • Wellington

    Reply
    November 16, 2013at11:38 pm

    You cant believe that the company does not have this readily available. Thanks for taking effort to show.

    Kind Reagards

  • Mubeen A

    Reply
    November 20, 2013at2:35 pm

    You are a star, it took me 2 days just to download the correct software, and after downloading, it took me less then 30 sec to do it, Thank you

  • mike

    Reply
    November 27, 2013at8:21 pm

    I just want to say that you saved me from a very disappointing day. This is exactly what I needed to both scale *and* calibrate a new touchscreen monitor. thanks for the post!

  • Johann W

    Reply
    January 10, 2014at8:11 pm

    Thanks!

  • Blake B

    Reply
    January 13, 2014at2:03 pm

    Thanks for the info! Very quick fix.

  • mihail

    Reply
    January 20, 2014at6:07 pm

    thnk bro. you my man

  • Andrei

    Reply
    February 20, 2014at8:51 pm

    thanks, saved me some time

  • Noob

    Reply
    February 23, 2014at7:09 am

    This solution totally worked! Thanks very much for posting this!

  • March 18, 2014at4:29 am

    Thank you so much.

  • Prasanta Nath

    Reply
    May 31, 2014at2:26 pm

    Thanks a lot 🙂

  • Vladimir

    Reply
    June 24, 2014at4:16 am

    Thanks very much for posting the solution for this problem.
    I was getting crazy trying to fix it, and now everything works perfectly.
    Anybody who takes the time to publish how they fixed a problem or resolved an issue deserves much appreciation, many thanks.
    Vladimir

  • MrSchimpf

    Reply
    July 2, 2014at9:31 am

    I hadn’t solved this issue for four years and thought my card was a dud. You have allowed me to finally ditch my DVI cable for a slimmer HDMI cable. Thank you!

  • MCP

    Reply
    January 4, 2018at10:44 pm

    Thank You!! I spend sooo much time setting a second monitor up and then sooo much time trying to get a fill picture! I would never have found that simiple solution. Thank you!

  • Andrej

    Reply
    January 19, 2018at10:15 pm

    Thanks, worked a treat

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