Problems Running Two Video Cards Simultaneously

test_tube_tony

ok, so i just had to reinstall windows the other night. before the reinstall, i had my 6600GT agp card, and a voodoo4 pci card installed running 3 monitors. when i set it up origionally, all i did was plug the pci card in and set the bios to boot the pci card first. it worked perfectly. now, i can only get one or the other to work, but not both, and sometimes neither of them work. i keep getting device cannot start errors in the device manager. i did get them all to come on once, but after i rebooted, it all went to to poop again. i am using ultramon by the way. is there something i may be missing? any thoughts? would using a pci nvidia card possibly work better than the 3dfx card?

TheSmJ

Get a cheap ass PCI nV card (I've seen the GF4 MX440 for less than $10 online). Two nV cards work together much more gracefully than two cards from two different brands.

3DFX stuff isn't supported in Windows XP anyways.

test_tube_tony

xp does have minimal support for 3dfx now. microshaft came up with some drivers that work pretty well a while back. i just find it interesting that it worked so well before but now it chokes.

TheSmJ

Still, you could fix the problem for good with a newer, supported card for only $10.

Check your SHIFT key too.

test_tube_tony

shifty key eh? hmm HMMM hhMMMmMMMMMmmm. yea the key is working. i think the problem is the user's just plain lazy.

test_tube_tony

ok. im all nvidia now. problem seems to be that xp is forcing me to use the same irq on both cards. cant change it either. any ideas?

TheSmJ

Only thing you can do is change the PC type to Standard, which you'll also lose all power control capability, and once you turn it off you can't turn it back on again w/o reinstalling Windows.

Sometimes you can change the IRQ the PCI slot uses in the BIOS (or put the card in a different slot) but there's no gaurntee Windows will be effected by it.