Page 1 of 1
2 video card (AGP + PCI) of differenct types
Posted:
Wed Jul 21, 2004 12:23 pmby dodecahedron
i saw at a friend's house, he has 2 monitors hooked to his computer. one runs off a Nvidia GeForce4 4400, the other off a PCI card (TNT2 i think).
the nView software work nice, though it take getting used to moving the mouse to the right side of the screen and it doesn't stop there!
got me thinking why not do the same, use the 2nd monitor that is supposedly for the 2nd computer, which isn't used at all.
my question:
will it work if the AGP card is Nvidia but the PCI card is ATI (or the other way around)? or must i make sure both cards are of the same type Nvidia/ATI for things to work smoothly?
Posted:
Wed Jul 21, 2004 12:57 pmby Bhairav
Are you going to be purchasing a new videocard, or are you using an existing video card + new PCI card? Which video card do you have right now? A GeForce FX5200 or Radeon 9200SE can be purchased pretty cheap, and they do dual monitor off one card.
Posted:
Wed Jul 21, 2004 1:49 pmby dodecahedron
interesting thought...didn't think of that one.
right now i'm running an Nvidia GeForce2 GTS (Asus V7700 Deluxe).
i guess it makes more sense to upgrade to a newer vid card that can run 2 monitors than to buy a PCI card...also solves the compatibility issue i raised.
do ATI 9800 cards do 2 monitors?
all or some of them (depending on manufacturer implementation)?
Posted:
Thu Jul 22, 2004 2:10 amby Bhairav
Yes, all 9800 cards do dual-monitor. Mine came with a VGA output and a DVI-out. They had bundled a DVI->VGA converter with the card too, so I can do 2 CRTs if I want.
Posted:
Sat Aug 14, 2004 2:23 pmby The Belgain
Theoretically, cards of different manufacturers should work fine together. However, there are some issues: one common one (which I'm having on my setup) is that some cards must be set to primary in BIOS to work. If you have two cards like this, then both cannot work at the same time.
As far as software is concerned, regardless of whether you use two different cards or not, if you're using more than one monitor you should try out a piece of software called UltraMon. It's got loads of nifty features, and is much better than both nview and the ATI equivalent (hydravision?).
The setup which is most likely to work is 2 monitors off the same card. Almost all modern cards can do this (any cards with eg one DVI and one D-Sub connection). The problem is I'm trying to run 3 monitors (well, 4 if you include the TV...). I can only get 2 of them running simultaneously.
Off topic: does anyone know if the upcoming nVidia 6600 cards have dual DVI?