3 Monitors, Big Problem

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by rossmedia, Sep 2, 2003.

  1. I have three monitors. Two of the monitors are on a Matrox G450 dual pci video card. The third on an Nvidia Gforce2 card that is a single monitor card. I can only get the 2 monitors on the Matrox card to work. The comupter always freezes at the startup screen ever since I installed the Nvidia drivers. I was told very clearly that the dual and the single card can coexist. Any help would be great as I planned to use the 3 monitor setup for tmr trading.

    Rossmedia
     
  2. nitro

    nitro

    Read your BIOS manual carefully for things that affect the video cards.

    First, make sure the AGP card "boots" first.

    Second, experiment with the Aperture setting in the BIOS. On mine, it is set to 256.

    Also take a look at things like Shadowing (sorry I forget the exact names of all these things in the BIOS, but I cannot reboot my machine to check the actual settings,) etc. Make sure you write down all the settings you are changing so that you can go back to where you were.

    nitro
     
  3. BIOS manual?, what and where is that? Please excuse my novice on this. Is there a way I can make my AGP monitor (I'm assuming that is the NVIDIA one) boot first. Your instruction are great, just a bit over my understanding of the whole video thing.

    rossmedia
     
  4. The last time I tried this configuration, I couldn't get it to work. According to the Matrox folks, their drivers have a conflict with the nVidia drivers.

    Maybe there is some way you can clean the nVidia drivers off your system and force the OS to use a generic VGA driver for the nVidia card and see if that works.

    -eLindy

    PS: If you have an intel 850e chipset, it compounds the problem bigtime.
     
  5. Where do I go to downlad a generic VGA driver?

    ross
     
  6. They are part of your windows OS. These would be under SVGA drivers.

    TM Trader
     
  7. Does the physical placement of my cards have any consequence on whether they will work or not?

    ross
     
  8. H2O

    H2O

    I don't know excacly why, but yes, I know it does matter.
    I know it has something to do with the priority of the PCI slots.
    Of course this would not affect the AGP, but if you have other PCI slots filled, there might just be a conflict between the PCI slots.

    You can always boot your machine in 'save mode' on start up by pressing <F8> This way you should be able to start up will all cards inside and make changes to your settings.
     
  9. gnome

    gnome

    1. You should have your additional video cards in PCI slots closest to the AGP slot.
    2. Video card driver conflicts are a big deal. Best if all your cards are from the same manufacturer (or you have verification that certain cards will work together.)
     
  10. get a cheap ATI card for about $40. It will work fine.
     
    #10     Sep 2, 2003