ddyck 0 Posted February 21, 2002 I want to be able to use two monitors on my computer. I've been reading about the ATI Radeon VE dual head card and many people claim it doesn't work well with Win2000. Can I enable dual monitors if I use 1 AGP card and 1 PCI card? I mostly do video editing and 3D work (very little gaming). Any help or experience on this issue would be greatly appreciated. zerod Share this post Link to post
Klark 0 Posted February 22, 2002 I know that using dual monitors with OpenGL can open up a large amount of problems. Though, I do have a friend that has had dual mons working with no OpenGL problems at all. So, I guess it all depends on your hardware. His primary card is a Voodoo 3 AGP, and the secondary card is an old 8MB Trident card. Another friend recently bought the RadeonVE card...and returned it to BestBuy in less than a day....mainly due to driver issues. Bad drivers from ATI ??...imagine that !! To answer your question, Yes you can use 1 AGP and 1 PCI card. But make sure you go into your BIOS and select which card will be the primary....AGP or PCI. Keep in mind, your secondary card does not need to be anything special, but atleast 8MB is recommended if you're going to be using a higher resolution than 1024 x 768 on the second monitor. For the secondary card, I would personally recommend an SIS 6326. They dual-mon very well, not to mention they'll share the PCI slot 1 IRQ without problems. This can be a problem for other cards mainly due to the fact that PCI slot 1 shares an IRQ with the AGP slot. Also, prices on the SIS 6326 are nice at around $20 for the 8MB PCI version. Don't know if I helped, but I figured I'd let you know what I have seen in the past... Good luck... Share this post Link to post
ddyck 0 Posted February 22, 2002 I'm now leaning towards using one AGP and one PCI card. I've heard these have to have a certain chipset (or maybe even the same chipset) in order for dual monitors to be supported. Is this correct? I'm leaning towards using one 64MB card with Video Out, but I'm not sure how powerful the other one needs to be. For doing lots of 3D modeling, if I want to use dual monitor support, should the other card be powerful as well, or does it matter? Any info on this would be great. Thanks. zerod Share this post Link to post
richlee91 0 Posted February 22, 2002 Multi monitors (1 AGP and 1 PCI) can cause stability problems. However they can also work very well. There are some good resources on the net. Check out http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/ I have installed a couple of different computers with multi monitors (for my parents and a couple of friends) I have two suggestions when selecting hardware. Try to buy both cards from the same chipset provider. (ie nvidia) and avoid ATI at all costs. I have a couple of systems that I have tryed getting an ATI card to be the secondary controller and have repeatedly failed. If both cards are from the same manufacturer my theory is that they have at least put two of their cards in the same PC and tested it. Both the nvidia (geforce 4) and matrox (G550) have dual head cards available. I would at least consider that option as well. Share this post Link to post
Klark 0 Posted February 22, 2002 ddyck... Like I said, the second monitor does not need to be anything special...prerably the SIS6326 card. The reason is, your 3D modeling application is going to run on your primary display...and you'll use the secondary for things other than the primary application. So the SIS card will be more than enough with 8MB. And yes, richlee91 is correct...stay away from ATI. Then again, I would stay away from them for any graphics need...not just dual mons. Good luck....again Share this post Link to post
