Multiple Graphics cards and multiple monitors too, radeon 9250's

madadamuk · February 12th, 2006, 04:12 PM

I have the following :

Windows XP SP2
AGP 8x Radeon 9250 256mb with dual monitor support
PCI Radeon 9250 256mb with dual monitor support

Windows has installed both cards fine and got correct drivers for them
Catalyst control centre is version 6.2

Windows display settings now shows four monitors, but three are greyed out
Catalyst control centre only shows the AGP graphics card and so only see's one monitor sonnected.

I want the first LCD on the AGP card
and the Second LCD on the PCI card

Any help or suggestions anyone?

edit: added some more relative system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 XP3200+
1.5GB 3200 RAM
see above for graphics cards
Hauppage Freeview TV card

EXreaction · February 12th, 2006, 04:14 PM

Welcome to TechIMO.

Why not just use the AGP card for both monitors?

madadamuk · February 12th, 2006, 04:16 PM

I would like the performance increase and have each card doing less work, plus i will possibly add a third monitor

I was previously using both monitors on the one AGP card.

Thanks for welcome

EXreaction · February 12th, 2006, 04:20 PM

I am pretty sure that you will not get any performance increase by using both...

When you get a third monitor, then try setting both up...it should have a setting somewhere to allow you to use 3 monitors...though I have not used an ATI card in so long...so I don't remember.

madadamuk · February 12th, 2006, 04:23 PM

Quote:

When you get a third monitor, then try setting both up

I do already have a third monitor at my disposal, and a fourth, hence why i wanted to get it sorted. I am just adding a monitor at a time, getting each working. I just want to be able to see one monitor from each graphics card as a start before i add another

EXreaction · February 12th, 2006, 04:26 PM

It would be better to add all 4 on at once...doing one at a time won't help with anything...it can only complicate things...

madadamuk · February 12th, 2006, 04:31 PM

Quote:

It would be better to add all 4 on at once...doing one at a time won't help with anything...it can only complicate things...

I understand what you are saying there, but i won't be using all the monitors all the time and that so don't want to put my third on just yet.

The performance increase i was thinking of was that i could possibly have one screen showing tv/internet/messenger whilst having another playing a game and it wasn't wanting to do that through one card very well, was very lagging.

(i have a freeview TV card in there aswell you see)

So what i figured is that with an extra GPU the processing would be shared out slightly more and therefore increasing the performance...

EXreaction · February 12th, 2006, 04:35 PM

No, using the other gpu for gaming should not help at all...if you want to multitask like that you would need a multi CPU system...

madadamuk · February 12th, 2006, 04:47 PM

i know that it won't actually lend any processing power to the game itself but only to the graphics. And with it being two 19" LCD's on hig resolutions then i would think its quite graphics intensive whatever i am doing.

And since i have the second PCI card i would like to use it, and use it to have both monitors connected via DVI.

I'm pretty sure it can be done, i'd just like to know if anyone knows how to go about doing it. I'm quite interested as to how its done also as i'm very interested in the computing industry and am studying it

EXreaction · February 12th, 2006, 04:55 PM

No, I doubt the graphics will be any better...running more than one thing at a time relys on your cpu much more than your gpu...

There is not a real noticable difference between DVI and VGA...especially on screen sizes 19" and less.

Yes, I don't doubt you can setup a quad display, but if you are not going to be using the quad setup much, it would be better to use one graphics card. 2 graphics cards won't help in one game unless you have an SLI, or crossfire setup.