Dear Lazyweb — how to get native screen resolution in F7?

For my birthday, I bought a nice new LCD monitor (it’s sooooo nice to not be a poor graduate student anymore…). A Samsung SyncMaster 204B. In addition to being a cool monitor, it also confirmed my slowly-formed theory about the source of the headaches I was frequently getting at nights and on weekends. It’s nice to finally be headache free again. However, there is a downside. Despite the extra cash I paid to get a monitor with 1600×1200 resolution and the extra time I had to spend to find such a monitor, Fedora 7 insists on running it at 1280×1024 or lower. ‘xrandr -q’ only lists resolutions at or below 1280×1024.

I went into system-config-display and selected “LCD Panel 1600×1200” and restarted X, but no luck. xrandr still doesn’t allow 1600×1200. I’m not that familiar or comfortable with xorg.conf, but I tried a couple things (explicitly adding a Modes line with the entries “1600×1200”, “1280×1024”, etc; modifying the HorizSync and VertRefresh to more closely match the specs I found online). No dice. I tried googling a bit and saw some Debian post about deleting one of the existing modelines, but my xorg.conf has no modelines and I’ve heard scary things about editing them and what can happen if you get it wrong. I feel like such a noob.

To Summarize: How do I get Fedora 7 to run my Samsung SyncMaster 204B at its native (1600×1200) resolution?

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

UPDATE: To answer some questions: I have an nvidia card (Quadro FX 1400 as far as I can tell from lscpi) and am using the nv driver. Also according to lspci, the video card seems to have 128MB memory. I’m using the DVI connection between the monitor and video card. System RAM is 2GB. Also:

[root@Eenie ~]# cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep 1600×1200
(II) NV(0): Modeline “1600×1200” 161.00 1600 1712 1880 2160 1200 1203 1207 1245 -hsync +vsync
(II) NV(0): Modeline “1600×1200” 162.00 1600 1664 1856 2160 1200 1201 1204 1250 +hsync +vsync
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode “1600×1200” (exceeds panel dimensions)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode “1600×1200” (exceeds panel dimensions)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode “1600×1200” (exceeds panel dimensions)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode “1600×1200” (exceeds panel dimensions)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode “1600×1200” (exceeds panel dimensions)
(II) NV(0): Not using driver mode “1600×1200” (exceeds panel dimensions)
(II) NV(0): Not using driver mode “1600×1200” (exceeds panel dimensions)
(II) NV(0): Not using mode “1600×1200” (no mode of this name)

Anyway, the first handful of suggestions didn’t pan out, but I’ve got about a dozen more in the comments to this blogpost, so I’m going to be trying some of them out. Thanks to everyone so far with suggestions.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone for the many additional suggestions.  Apparently no amount of xorg.conf tweaking will fix this issue.  As nona and ajax pointed out in the comments, this is apparently a limitation of the nv drivers.  (See freedesktop bug 3654 and bug 4314) Apparently the workarounds are to either use the proprietary nvidia drivers (yes, I do feel a bit icky right now; and worried–they haven’t been very stable for me in the past) or use the VGA connection instead of DVI (which now that I’ve been made aware of, I might be soon switching to this).

It is nice to have the native 1600×1200 resolution now.