Lenovo 7i / Intel Core i5-1135G7 - External monitor resolution troubleshooting

[JDMWDC]

I just bought this Lenovo Yoga 7i laptop (spec sheet here) which has a 1920x1080 display, and I'm plugging it into this Acer G257HU external monitor which supports 2560x1440.

Because the laptop does not have any HDMI or DisplayPort output, I'm using this USB-C to DisplayPort cable, plugged into the laptop's Thunderbolt 4 port.

The connection definitely works, as soon as I plugged the external monitor into the laptop, it recognized the second display.

The problem is that the external monitor is only giving me options for a resolution up to 1920x1080. I even tried installing the monitor driver from the Acer website and downloaded Intel's Graphics Command Center.

The Intel chip supports 8K so it's not a limiting factor there. Neither the Windows Display settings menu, nor the Intel Graphics Command Center will let me increase the resolution on the monitor to 2K, it always shows the maximum options at 1080. The monitor runs fine in 2K on the current machine (a tower, not a laptop, but has a 5 year old i3-530 chip with the integrated GPU). What gives?

I tried just about every Display setting change possible: disabling the laptop monitor, extended and duplicate/clone display modes, I'm just lost. 

Any ideas before I return the laptop?

[JDMWDC]

Nevermind. Lenovo said they capped the chip so that it can't transmit higher than FHD to an external display.

What a dumb company.

[psyopper]

I am running into this same problem. I believe you, but I find it hard to believe a laptop OEM like Lenovo would cap that. 

How did you get in touch with Lenovo to figure this out? I am stuck in a loop with their auto-chat bot that isn't actually providing any useful information. 

[AndrewG_Intel]

Hello @JDMWDC

Thank you for posting on the Intel® communities.

We noticed that you found out that the root cause of this behavior is a hardware limitation by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). Thank you for sharing this feedback so it may help other peers having the same issue to understand what the root cause is.

Having said that, we will proceed to close this thread now. If you need any additional information, please submit a new question as this thread will no longer being monitored.

Best regards,

Andrew G.

Intel Customer Support Technician