freddy 0 Posted November 25, 2003 Just a simple question. I have a Dell machine with onboard graphics, no AGP slot, 3 PCI slots. I need to add another monitor to the machine (just for office purposes so nothing that graphics intenses - just spreadsheets and the like). Can I add a PCI graphics card and still use the onboard graphics along side? Normally I would just get an AGP graphics card with dual output, but with only PCI slots and onboard graphics I'm not sure if I can simply add a PCI card and use both. If so...any recommendations on a good PCI graphics card? Or can you buy dual VGA output PCI graphics cards and disable the onboard graphics? Thanks for you help. FREDDY Share this post Link to post
Mr.Guvernment 0 Posted November 25, 2003 yes - u can do that - as long as in the bios it is set to boot from AGP (even though it is built in vid) AGP first. as for a good PCi card not really any out - there is some radeon 7000 or 7500 i think u can get in PCI flavour and a couple low end Nvidia cards - personally i would go with the ati as the earlier cards tend to have better image quality over nvidia, Share this post Link to post
freddy 0 Posted November 25, 2003 Excellent! Thanks for your quick reply! FREDDY Share this post Link to post
Tomay 0 Posted November 25, 2003 I had a dual vga setup 1 agp and 1 pci graphic card. But not all pci cards work with all agp ones. Make sure you try before you buy. My best experiences were with ati pci cards. Any old pci card will do the job and they are very cheap. Share this post Link to post
Shakedown 0 Posted November 25, 2003 Actually, this depends. We have OptiPlex systems and if you install a PCI card it will auto disable the onboard vid. For dual monitors we have been using vid cards especially for this purpose. Share this post Link to post
Alien 1 Posted November 26, 2003 You can get better PCI cards than the 7000 or 7500, infact you can get dual display PCI cards. Saphire make a Radeon 9000 128MB PCI dual output card - in this country it goes for just under £60. Link Share this post Link to post
Mr.Guvernment 0 Posted November 30, 2003 ^^^ great did not know that! anyways - as for a pciandAGp card not working - it is always bets to gethe same make of card - as in bioth the same company - do not get one ATia nd one nvidia or matrox - as tihs often cause driver conflicts - so if u ever go one agp and one pcio get the same company of card and if possible - same model Share this post Link to post
Alien 1 Posted December 1, 2003 That's not necessarily true in all cases. I had an [original - before they started puting 4 digit numbers in their names] ATI Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO [AGP] & 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 PCI running ok together for quite a while with no probs. Ok, so there was 1 prob which I thought was a conflict, but now that I have a single-card dual-monitor solution by ATI [well, made by Saphire, but you know what I mean] I know that it's a bug in the ATI drivers, not an issue with other cards. In case anyone's interested, the prob in question is that when you enable extended desktop the Schemes function disappears. Share this post Link to post
