W2K Dual Monitor

[Phear 0]

Anyone know of a semi-decent graphics card that works well as a secondary graphics adapter under Win2k? I currently have a TNT2A as the primary display adapter and a Creative Banshee PCI as a secondary display adapter. It works perfectly under 98SE but under 2000 it produces garbage during boot up or hangs the machine totally I assume this is a driver problem but since the chances of seeing new w2k banshee drivers are next to nothing I was wondering if some1 could point me in the direction of another PCI graphics card which works perfectly as a secondary display adapter? I have tried 2-3 cheap s3 and Cirrus Logic PCI cards, all of which work perfectly in 98SE but wont even fire up as secondary display adapters in w2k at all (yellow exclamation mark jobs). All I want is a PCI card with 4Mb of RAM that works as a secondary display adapter. Or do I have to resort to a Matrox Dual Head system?

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

System Specs:

 

Dual Celeron 433 O/C 560(ish)

Abit BP6

256Mb PC100

IBM 22GXP 22Mb HDD

Elsa Erazor III TnT2 Pro Graphics

Creative Banshee PCI

SB Live Value

8x/4x/32x HP CDRW

Generic 100Mbit Network Card

 

 

Thanx

 

Phear

[Seldzar 0]

I had a banshee for my second monitor and had the garbage boot issues. It ran stable however when it didn't garbage boot. I got a voodoo3 2000 pci and this card is jsut beautiful for dual monitor

 

[This message has been edited by Seldzar (edited 07 June 2000).]

[peterro 0]

Have u tried a ATI card? I haven't tested it myself, but they are generally pretty stable. A friend of mine has a TNT as a second card (GeForce is 1.st) and it works great, no boot problems at all.

 

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AMD Athlon 750MHz

ASUS K7V

ASUS V6800 PURE

128MB 133RAM

20,5 GB IBM HD

[Mr Furious 0]

I've tried the same thing. Under 98 I had a choice of an MGA Mysique or a Trio 64V+ as my second card (I chose the latter so nothing would detect the MGA D3D compatability). Under Win2K neither of these work as a second card when up with my V3 3000 AGP. Are we going to be waiting for a service pack d'you think?

Also, my ATI Rage Pro PCI didn't work under 98 or 2K, so I can't shed al light on an ATI card working.

[PinkPanther 0]

I also use the Voodoo3 2000 PCI as my second dislay, and have had no problems. My AGP card is a GeForce.

 

P.S. - MANY dual monitor problems can be solved by setting the PCI card as the primary boot-up card in the CMOS Setup - Win2k can then take either card as the primary monitor.

 

Regards

[peterro 0]

Thats right, PinkPanther, i forgot that. My friend also has to set the display to PCI as primary, and not AGP. Works in 98 with AGP on primary, but not in 2k. Does anybody know why? Drivers? The NT technology itself?

 

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AMD Athlon 750MHz

ASUS K7V

ASUS V6800 PURE

128MB 133RAM

20,5 GB IBM HD

[NotSoSmart 0]

It may be something with the way it loads drivers during start up cause I have to set the bios for PCI to work. W2K would see the card and load drivers but would report as unable to initialize video card in the device manager. Then again it may be the way the MB is setup to work.

 

oops using an old Diamond Stealth 2 meg Vram on a 15" it is ok

 

[This message has been edited by NotSoSmart (edited 08 June 2000).]

[Phear 0]

Thanx for the info guys, I had already tried the Init PCI first in bios and then letting W2K switch the primary display and it works perfectly. Only problem is that I dual boot W2K and 98SE (cos W2K drivers just aint quite up to it yet for games, and I'm a SERIOUS UT player: check out www.utassault.net ), and if I set Init PCI first in the bios 98SE uses the Banshee for D3D (wont let ya switch Primary & Secondary in 98). And there goes my D3D performance

 

Thanx for the info on the V3 but does anyone know of a slightly cheaper card that works perfectly as a secondary display adapter? I don't really want to spend that much on a secondary graphics card unless absolutely nessacary.

 

Oh and the new Banshee Drivers didn't help either

 

Thanx again.

 

Phear