dual video cards
Hey. I was trying to get dual video cards to work for me so I can have a bigger workspace for my recording stuff. I got a PCI radeon 32mb card with vga/dvi out. I already had an agp card in there. However, when I installed both, the thing would just beep at me several times and not even boot up the pc. When I loaded either one up individually, it worked, but not together. sigh I’m going to take it back I guess and wait until I can get a dual card. The one I got it a dual card, technically, but w/ only 32 mb, so I want to at least get back up to my 128. The thing is that I thought that two vid cards would work together. Is it a pci/agp thing, perhaps? Anyone with dual monitors know?
fish
They should be able to work together, although it’s a question of many "but"s. I’ve used (and installed) double vid cards only for Mac, and there were no problems. Seems your motherboard has problems telling which card to use as the primary. Maybe there’s something to toggle at the BIOS startup settings?
Hi savingedmund and Mwah:
I’m not at the top-end of these issues, but I seem to think it could be an IRQ. assignment problem. The P-4 I have in the studio has a Matrox G-550 card in it… It works like a charm. I’m trying to spec. this" New Computer " and I’m leaning toward a Matrox G-750 card for it. It will support Three Monitors. At least, I think it will. One for the track time-line…one for the Plugs… and one for the mixer screen…
There is no substute to haveing a good working video card in your DAW. It’s so important. That’s what I think…
If phoo comes on here, he may put you on the right path to setting your two cards up…
Bill…
No idea if this would work, but it seems that the extra video card would take up another IRQ… I’ve had great luck running two monitors with a single video card with a dual out. Most new cards have an analog out and a digital out; all you need is a convertor for the digital output ($10 or so) and you’re good to go.
-John
The ideal solution is to get ONE card with TWO video outputs (like the matrox ones).
But i have one AGP and one PCI. I tell you my case, maybe helps you:
W98SE
-I need to set in BIOS that the AGP is the primary display.(maybe you can try set PCI one to primary display, be sure to have a monitor connected to see the boot)
-I need upgrade the AGP drivers (Intel3D express graphic card) to newer, because the first ones DONT WORK with two display cards. Be sure to get the latest drivers for BOTH graphic Cards.
-I must tryed diffrent pci slots, the pci slot more near to the AGP one, for any reason is problematic.
-Some Bios have the option of “Plug’nPlay” OS that avoid that the Bios do the irq arrangement itself and let the os do.
Well, some things to play,
LUCK!
thanks marce. I’ll try that. Although I have the sneaky suspision my dad has put his video card in my pc while I have been at work today. his is a dual out card (one vga, one dvi. all you need is a dvi to vga connector). He does stuff like that sometimes.
fish
I set up 3 video cards for one my clients!!! I had never seen this done before, but my client had done it before on Win 98. It worked quite well on Win XP although we had to fool around with it to get it to work correctly. The system saw more virtual video cards then were there. I can’t remember if we had to install drivers for each card. The cards I used in the PCI slots were different than the main card.
Once that was setup, it was a little wierd getting the mouse to go from left-to-right.
I’m running two out of one card.
Thinking about going to three. . . maybe even four. . .
N track on one, it’s mixer and meters on the next. . . but where do I load up Acid that it’s slaved to, or it’s extras, lol. . .
Used to have another computer linked up for midi use, using Synergy to let me control both with one keyboard/mouse.
I don’t think I could go back to just one for audio (or my video partition for that matter)
My machine at work had three video cards in it. All three are nVidia based - two are GeForce MX420 PCI and one is GeForce MX5200 AGP (or something like that - it’s a Dell OEM card). The combination with the two MX420’s has worked well for over two years in a variety of machines and with different main AGP cards. The trick is finding hardware that works well in combination.
Recent, like last week, one of the MX420 cards died (another is on order). Out of a stack of available PCI cards (mostly older ATI) I wasn’t able to find one that would work as a temporary replacement in combination with the nVidia cards left.
At home I have a Matrox Millennium G400 Dual Head. I run one monitor at 16001200 and the other at 12801024. I have a couple of Iiyama monitors that are very clear at higher resolutions.
I don’t have any problems with n-Tracks graphics on either machine (WinXp Pro and Intel CPU and chipset in both).
Well, my dad found an ATI Radeon 9200 128mb AGP for less than the 7000 32mb I bought. The one I got was 50 bucks at compUSA, and the 9200 was like 42. I don’t know where he found it, online someplace. So, as that is a dual card (DVI and VGA), I’m gonna take the 7000 back and get the 9200. But thanks for all the help. I’m sure someone could have helped me get this working right (they were both ATI’s, so I would think they should play ball together ). You guys rock.
oops. I just figured out that he might have been looking at a 9200SE, which doesn’t have dual outs. I gotta check on that…
Fish
One of my home machines has a ATI Radeon 7000 AGP (32mb?). I put it in a few weeks ago because the previous card wouldn’t run a couple of games my son got for Christmas. That machine use to be stable, but now it’s regularly showing video glitches and random crashes. I have the latest driver from MS Windows Update, but haven’t checked to see if there is anything new on the ATI site.
This is the card I was going to put in the AMD machine to see if I could repro nocents graphic problems. (It’s been h-e-l-l week at work, for a couple of weeks going and coming, so I haven’t gotten to it). If having this card in a 750 PIII machine is showing these kinds of problems I suspect it will be worse in the AMD machine, since it’s already as flaky as heck with games. This particular PIII 750 machine was the old on I used for many years with n-Tracks without problems. The video card I used most of those years was an All-In-Wonder Pro 128 (the one I pulled out a few weeks ago).
Wow. I’m glad I am taking that back now. Hopefully the 9200 will be better. My dad has one and it works great…