etbe – Russell Coker

I previously blogged about buying a refurbished Hisense 65u80g 8K TV with the aim of making it a large monitor [1] and about searching for a suitable video card for 8k [2]. After writing the second post I bought an Intel Arc B580 which also did a maximum of 4096*2160 resolution.

This post covers many attempts to try and get the TV to work correctly and it doesn’t have good answers. The best answer might be to not buy Hisense devices but I still lack data.

Attempts to Force 8K

I posted on Lemmy again about this [3] and got a single response, which is OK as it was a good response. They didn’t give me the answer on a silver platter but pointed me in the right direction of EDID [4].

I installed the Debian packages read-edid, wxedid, and edid-decode.

The command “get-edid > out.edid” saves the binary form of the edid to a file. The command “wxedid out.edid” allows graphical analysis of the EDID data. The command “edid-decode out.edid” dumps a plain text representation of the output, the command “edid-decode out.edid|grep VIC|cut -d: -f2|sort -n” shows an ordered list of video modes, in my case the highest resolution is 4096×2160 which is the highest that Linux had allowed me to set with two different video cards and a selection of different cables (both HDMI and DisplayPort).

xrandr --newmode 7680x4320 1042.63  7680 7984 7760 7824  4320 4353 4323 4328
xrandr --addmode HDMI-3 7680x4320
xrandr --output HDMI-3 --mode 7680x4320

I ran the above commands and got the below error:

xrandr: Configure crtc 0 failed

At this time I don’t know how much of this is due to the video card and how much is due to the TV. The parameters for xrandr came from a LLM because I couldn’t find any Google results on what 8K parameters to use. As an aside if you have a working 8K TV or monitor connected to a computer please publish the EDID data, xrandr, and everything else you can think of.

I found a Github repository for EDID data [5] but that didn’t have an entry for my TV and didn’t appear to have any other entry for an 8K device I could use.

Resolution for Web Browsing

I installed a browser on the TV, Chrome and Firefox aren’t available for a TV and the Play Store program tells you that (but without providing a reason) when you search for them. I tried the site CodeShack What is my Screen Resolution [6] which said that my laptop is 2460*1353 while the laptop display is actually 2560*1440. So apparently I have 100 pixels used for the KDE panel at the left of the screen and 87 pixels used by the Chrome tabs and URL bar – which seems about right. My Note 9 phone reports 384*661 out of it’s 2960*1440 display so it seems that Chrome on my phone is running web sites at 4/15 of the native resolution and about 16% of the height of the screen is used by the system notification bar, the back/home/tasklist buttons (I choose buttons instead of swipe for navigation in system settings), and the URL bar when I have “Screen zoom” in system settings at 1/4. When I changed “Screen zoom” to 0/4 the claimed resolution changed to 411*717 (2/7 of the native resolution). Font size changes didn’t change the claimed resolution. The claimed “Browser Viewport Size” by CodeShack is 1280*720 which is 1/6 of the real horizontal resolution and slightly more than 1/6 of the vertical resolution, it claims that the Pixel Density is 2* and a screen resolution of 970*540 which means to imply that the browser is only working at 1920*1080 resolution!

Netflix

When I view Netflix shows using the Netflix app running on the TV is reports “4K” which doesn’t happen on Linux PCs (as they restrict 4K content to platforms with DRM) and in the “Device” setting it reports “Device Model” as “Hisense_SmartTV 8K FFM” so the Netflix app knows all about 4K content and knows the text string “8K”.

YouTube

When I view a YouTube video that’s described as being 8K I don’t get a request for paying for YouTube Premium which is apparently what happens nowadays when you try to play actual 8K video. I turn on “State for Nerds” and one line has “Viewport / Frames 1920×1080*2.00” and another has “Current / Optimal Res 3840×2160@60 / 3840×2160@60” so it seems that the YouTube app is seeing the screen as 4K but choosing to only display FullHD even when I have Quality set to “2160p60 HDR”. It declares the network speed to be over 100mbit most of the time and the lowest it gets is 60mbit while 50mbit is allegedly what’s required for 8K.

I installed a few Android apps to report hardware capabilities and they reported the screen resolution to be 1920*1080.

Have I Been Ripped Off?

It looks like I might have been ripped off by this. I can’t get any app other than Netflix to display 4K content. My PC will only connect to it at 4K. Android apps (including YouTube) regard it as 1920*1080.

The “AI Upscaling” isn’t really that great and in most ways it seems at best equivalent to a 4K TV and less than a 4K TV that runs Android apps with an actual 4K display buffer.

Next Steps

The next things I plan to do are to continue attempts to get the TV to do what it’s claimed to be capable of, either an Android app that can display 8K content or a HDMI input of 8K content will do. Running a VNC client on the TV would be an acceptable way of getting an 8K display from a Linux PC.

I need to get a somewhat portable device that can give 8K signal output. Maybe a mini PC with a powerful GPU or maybe one of those ARM boards that’s designed to drive an 8K sign. Then I can hunt for stores that have 8K TVs on display.

It would be nice if someone made a USB device that does 8K video output – NOT a USB-C DisplayPort alternative mode that uses the video hardware on the laptop. Then I could take a laptop to any place that has an 8K display to show and connect my laptop to it.

The one thing I haven’t done yet is testing 8K MP4 files on a USB stick. That’s mainly due to a lack of content and the fact that none of the phone cameras I have access to can do 8K video. I will try displaying 8K PNG and JPEG files from a USB stick.

Most people would give up about now. But I am determined to solve this and buying another large TV isn’t out of the question.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/12/15/hisense-65u80g-8k-tv/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/03/06/8k-video-cards/
• [3] https://lemmy.ml/post/38586188
• [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identification_Data
• [5] https://github.com/linuxhw/EDID
• [6] https://codeshack.io/what-is-my-screen-resolution/

HP z840 Dead Slot

I just had an issue with the HP z840 system I’m using as a build server [1]. I had to take it to a site that was about 20 minutes drive away and after getting there it didn’t work and just gave 6 beeps and the red LED on the power button flashed. The beeps indicate a video issue, which refers to the Intel Arc B580 card (which is annoyingly large) [2]. I swapped the card with another video card I had lying around (which I knew to be reliable) and got the same result.

It turned out that the PCIe*16 slot that I was using for it had broken, maybe bumps during transport with the big heavy GPU had broken it. I plugged it into the next slot along which is a PCIe*8 slot that’s open ended so it takes larger cards. The upside of this is that the system is still working well, the downside is that the issues I already had with the GPU being unreasonably large are exacerbated by losing one of the *16 slots. Having it in a PCIe 3.0*8 slot is not a problem for me as I only plan to use it for 8K display and for ML stuff and I think that *8 speed (7.8GB/s) is sufficient for both those tasks. In that slot the card could display 8K video at 60Hz with 32bpp and no compression (something that I don’t anticipate ever doing). It could also transfer the maximum size LLM in under 2 seconds which isn’t an unreasonable delay for starting a LLM.

The question now is, should I remove PCIe cards before transport in future?

HP z640 Intermittant Errors

The next issue I have is with my HP z640 workstation which is now my main workstation [3]. I started getting the below errors and then I had the kwin_wayland session hang and another time I started getting video corruption with mpv.

Oct 10 20:46:36 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Correctable error 
message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:36 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: found no error details 
for 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Multiple Correctable 
error message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:   device [8086:2f04] error 
status/mask=00001040/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:    [ 6] BadTLP                
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER:   Error of this Agent 
is reported first
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:   device [1002:6987] error 
status/mask=00001000/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:   device [1002:aae0] 
error status/mask=00001000/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Correctable error 
message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: found no error details 
for 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Multiple Correctable 
error message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: found no error details 
for 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Multiple Correctable 
error message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:   device [8086:2f04] error 
status/mask=00001040/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:    [ 6] BadTLP                
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER:   Error of this Agent 
is reported first
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:   device [1002:6987] error 
status/mask=00001100/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:    [ 8] Rollover              
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:   device [1002:aae0] 
error status/mask=00001100/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:    [ 8] Rollover              
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:    [12] Timeout        

On that system I took the CPU out and reinstalled it with new heatsink paste on the theory that it might not have made good contact with some of the pins. The system also has one DIMM slot not working which can be a symptom of poor seating of the CPU. Doing that made no difference to the DIMM slot (I had bought the system for $50 in “unknown condition”) but the video has worked correctly since. It has been suggested to me that reseating the CPU didn’t directly affect the issue and that just taking the system apart could have addressed an issue of the GPU not making good contact in the PCIe slot.

It has been suggested that I could try “contact cleaner” which can be obtained from automotive supply stores among other places. I’m hesitant to put that in a PCIe slot but putting it on the connector of the card and then polishing it off seems like something to consider. Another suggestion was to use isopropyl alcohol to wash the contacts. I guess washing a PCIe slot out with isopropyl alcohol and leaving it for hours to dry is an option as a last resort.

For the moment it seems to be fine but I am not certain that the problem is gone forever. At the moment my main aim is to have these systems keep working until after the release of DDR6 workstations which is when I expect DDR5 workstations to become affordable on all the second hand sites.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/04/05/hp-z840/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/06/20/intel-arc-b580-pcie-slot-size/
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/04/05/hp-ml110-gen9-z640/