Of course, it SHOULDN'T... just appears that it does. I've always avoided a mobo with "onboard video", knowing I'd need the cooperation of the chipset and BIOS for multi-card. Sometimes, however, even the ones with onboard video would allow "anything you could fit into a slot"... but not always.
I'm sorry, but in this post you sound like a POMPOUS ASS. Feel free to call up Dell and speak to their engineers, their technical people ( as I did ), or come across others that have had power "on" issues when installing a PCI-Express AND PCI card in certain Dell models. One simple check on the Dell Community Forums and you will see that I am not the ONLY person that has come across this exact same issue.
As an issue of logic... if you can find even ONE case where you can't get 2 video cards to work together (with the cards not being defective, of course), it's not solely a "Windows issue". There MUST be cooperation with the mobo and its components for multi-card. And that has been my experience.
If it came broken thats one thing, but I was refering to the functionality of it assuming it came fully functional. If Dell sent a bad product or broke something in the process of making it and did not fix it thats another matter. I have hooked up MM set-ups on 7 Vostro PC's so far never had an issue. 200 and 400 models.... I have done it on the Precisions, Deminsions, XPS's, Optiplex's and servers also and no issues. I was just trying to help and not be verbally attacked. P.S. Dell's REPs don't know shit about anything! Never have and probably never will. Good luck!
Not a bad deal on Dell's website, bare bones T3400 for $419. http://www.dell.com/content/product...n_t3400?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~tab=bundlestab
A friend got a pny geforce 5200 pci card to work great in my 4 month old Vostro 400. I use it to drive a third monitor. Since then I spoke with Dell and they told me to use two dvi splitters one on each dvi port of the 8600gts card I have in order to have 4 montior displays. If I just want three displays to use just one splitter. I ordered the splitters but I am reluctant to "fix" something that is working. The only oddity with my pci card is I had to disable the nvidia service otherwise on each reboot I got an xp error report about the service. John
I guess I'm the lucky one. I use ATI PCIe x16 card and nVidia PCI card on my desktop to drive 4 20" monitors with absolutely no issues whatsoever. Oh yeah, the motherboard also has an on-board video as well, but it hasn't caused any conflicts at all. And it's a crappy Dell Dimension desktop.... However, I do agree that mixing ATI/nVidia together is normally a bad combo. I just happened to make it work on mine.... Getting a MB with 2 PCIe x16 slots is really an overkill for a trading system though for most, normal traders. Just get a decent desktop with an empty PCIe x16 and PCI slot, and get a cheap video card for each slot from a same chip manufacturer (either nVidia or ATI) and you should be all good to hook up 4 monitors without any problem.
The problem is that on certain models the mobo/chipset doesn't cooperate well with multi-card. Which Dell model is yours? And with a T3400 for $419, perhaps new buyer shouldn't even bother with Vostro...