How do I get my late-2012 MacBook Pro to work with my Seiki 39 inch 4k monitor?

I've tried quite a few settings and haven't been able to get it to display anything better than 3840*2160 14hz, while I've ready about quite a few people that have their MacBook Pros working with the Seiki 4K pretty easily.

So I ask: what exactly are your settings with yours or how do I get mine to work?

Using a Belkin Thunderbolt-HDMI adapter (and have tried plain HDMI as well), have SwitchResX installed (but haven't gotten 3840*2160-30HZ to be accepted by the computer) with an Intel HD 4000 graphics card.

Solution 1:

You will need an active adapter that converts the DisplayPort 1.1 signal coming from your Thunderbolt port to an HDMI 1.4 Signal. The UltraAV Mini DisplayPort 1.1 to HDMI 1.4 Active Adapter for example. The regular (passive) adapters will not give you the HDMI 1.4 that is required for your resolution.

Also, make sure your HDMI cable is High Speed certified (sometimes it's called a Category 2 cable), and that you use the right resolution, refresh rate and color depth.

HDMI resolutions

HDMI Standard    1.3a                 1.4                   2.0 
HDMI cable       Standard/Cat1        HighSpeed/Cat2        HighSpeed/Cat2
Resolution       2880x576  2560x1600  3840x2160  4096x2160  4096x2160
Max Refresh Rate 50 Hz     75 Hz      30 Hz      24 Hz      60 Hz
Max Color Depth  48 bpp    30 bpp     36 bpp     48 bpp     30 bpp
                                      ^

Mind the maximum color depth, although 24 bits per pixel should suffice for most uses. On the Mac, 24 bit is sometimes called "millions of colors".

Solution 2:

The HD 4000 isn't a "graphics card" it's a GPU built into the Ivy Bridge processor. You may well find 14Hz is all you can get out of it.

The people who succeed in getting 3840 by 2160 at 30HZ are on MacBook Pro's that were released later and have the Intel Iris GPU built in to the Haswell processor.

Given even 30hz looks pretty bad you might be best to drop the resolution back to that of a 30" monitor such as 2560 x 1600 or similar.

Solution 3:

You're getting that framerate because your Thunderbolt-HDMI adapter supports only 2 PCIe lanes - the specs say 10Gb/s, with a little 'b', and there's 10b/8b error correction.

That's just not nearly enough bandwidth for raw 4K.

@Tony William's answer is fundamentally the better one though, because you'd never be happy with the output even if you soldered the connection to the logic board without a dedicated GPU. I'm not even sure the integrated graphics in Haswell are sufficient. Probably with Broadwell come 2015.