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Dual Video Card and Dual Monitors with XP

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Capt Fiero

Member
Joined
Dec 7, 2002
Location
Abbotsford BC Canada
I want to run 2 video cards and 2 monitors with XP, I tired it once. The machine recognized the 2nd card but would not send a signal out to the 2nd monitor. Does anyone have a "how to" on what I need to get this working. Or even know of a web page to get this working.

Oh the first card is a Voodoo3 3000 AGP and the 2nd card is a simple 4meg pci. I want the 2nd one just for directory listings when doing web page authoring.

Thanks In Advance
 
go to properties on the desktop. Under settings you should be able to switch between the 2 monitors. Select monitor 2 which should be grayed out if it isn't working. When you click it, it should ask if u want to activate that display. Hit yeah.
 
I thought to do something like this you needed a Duel Cpu machine. Seeing how a Cpu can only do one instruction at a time, I don't know how it could ever display the way you want it to with one Cpu. If the One cpu was sending information to the 1st video card then the 2nd one would fall behind . I guess this would be in games that it would fall behine unless you had 2 cpu's doing the work. I would think you would need 2 cpu's to do this. Actuall no matter what I think it would be better on a dule system. One cpu would get a bit lagged down in all the work to render two cards worth on info.

just my 2 cents and they aint worth much here in Canada.
 
hehe..

Dual Videocards work fine on a single cpu..I mean jezz look at the rig that has dual monitors in my sig...

And thats with WInXP Pro...
Besides the CPU doesnt have actualy render anything for the second card because games will run on which card you have set in as your primary Video card in XP, Which you just simply right click on the monitor that teh card is hooked up under Display properties/ Settings and there are Options such as "Primary", Which will either have a check by it and be greyed out, or you can select it, the other option is "Attached"..this basicly turns that monitor on or off, Most of the time if its off all you do is click it and Windows will ask you to "Attach" it....


Now back to the main problesm so I dont ramble off into confusion.... The reason you are getting a Error saying teh device could not start is because You need to boot off that PCI card and not the AGP... DOnt worry once in Windows XP you can set the AGP card as primary. Sometimes windows is nice enough to remember that the AGP card list as Radeon, Geforce or whatever was the original Primary VGA device and after it shows the WinXP boot screen on the PCI one it will automaticaly pop up on the AGP card and continue load as normal, and install the drivers for the second Video card, if it has them, If its a newer card it will ask you for the drivers and install them... Then it will say you need to reboot in order to use the newly installed device...

Reboot and your pc will boot off the PCI card once again...
When you get into windows you may have to arrange the monitors to how you actualy have them setup on your desk, All you do is Drag the monitor around in the Display properties and Hit apply....

I hope I havent just confused you..
I think I should explain why you need to boot off the PCI card
...This is a motherboard issue most of the time, Something with resources and Windows, But all you have to do is go into your BIOS and set your board to boot off the PCI card...
So whats going to happen from now on once you get everything setup... Your motherboard will boot off the PCI card and then Windows will use the AGP card...

Ill warn you, soem games like castle Wolfinstine wont work with dual monitors and try to use the pci card. or agp over an extended desktop...But when it does this it prevents you from oveing the mouse at all in the game and to fix this you have to exit the game and "Detach" the second monitor/ PCI card so that windows turns it off and relaod the game, it will now only see one registerd Videocard and load off it....This is what the demo of RTCW has done to me for the past few weeks...

I only have xperience with dual monitors involving 2 video cards, I have yet to mess with a video card that will run dual monitors at the same time...But I plan on this...soon...


Hmmm I may write an article one weekend on dual monitors for overclockers.com..Cause I think we need it...
 
Again Angry to the Rescue. Thank You very much. No one ever sugested to go into the Bios and change it to PCI from AGP. I changed it booted up and poof it works like a charm. You are "Da Man"


Thank You Again.


"The Capt"
 
herm.. i never would have thought of that Angry, because mine boots off of the agp.

Glad to hear you got it workin.
 
i am currently trying to set up my dual monitors.... its not working at all. i have a really really old monster 3d 4mb pci card, which i put in and hooked up to a second monitor. my primary agp card is a geforce2 gts 32mb. i used the installation cd for my pci card and i installed the driver but windows does not recognize the pci card at all. i tried going into my bios and booting off the pci, that doesn't help either. someone help me??
 
Just a side note for Angry-

On my system (A7V133) I have 2 ATI cards. AIW Pro 8MB AGP and a Radeon 7500 64MB PCI. I am running XP Home. In order to have both cards functional, I must boot (in BIOS) from AGP. If I set the bios to PCI, XP will not load the AGP card. This seems to be the opposite of what you suggested.

Just wanted to let you know that it does work the other way around and may just depend on the system.
 
Well it worked for me on my P3B-F motherboard. When i upgraded my system to the new P4B motherboard I used the exact same cards, I used the exact same OS, Same Hard Drives same everything. I tried for the life of me to get it to work and it would not work with the newer bios. I changed stuff, I tweaked stuff, I re-loaded drivers, I updated drivers and I finnaly had spent so much time fighting with it that I could have just bought a new dual head card for what I had spent.

So I went out priced a few cards and decided I did not need the ulitmate in gamming and if you find the search around you can find a version of the GF4 MX440 card that has DDR Ram, VIVO and dual heads. I formated the drives again and when I rebooted the machine, both moniters came up like magic. Totally sweet. Having 2 moniters is one of the best mods I have done. When doing network swapping, I can open the folder from the other computer onto the 2nd moniter and my main folder on my main machine and just drag and drop without having 2 small folders. Also great for watching movies. I can watch movies on the top and still do my work on the bottom.


In short just buy a video card that has dual heads. You will save a ton of grief. Some cards just wont work together on some Motherboards.
 
I've been running mulitple monitors for a long time now. One thing that I've always found was that keeping the same manufacturer really helps.

I have 6 PCI video cards ranging from 2Mb to 32Mb and at one point i was running 3 monitors on one PC. My AGP card is a GF4 and i have two GF2MX's in PCI slots.

It's under win2k and not xp, but xp is built off of 2k so its probably fairly simliar. I had lots of problems trying to run a GF4 a matrox G200 and some old SIS card (i think, it was crap, thats all you need to know)
 
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