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fbrier 2003-01-03 14:45
I just put together what was supposed to be my dream machine, but even with great effort and cost have failed to get it working. I've never put together a multimonitor system. Not since the days when we debugged on a monochrome monitor next to a CGA/EGA display.
Ok. The motherboard is an Asus P4PE. The AGP card is an ABit Siluro (Ti4200) connected to a 20" CRT, and 2 Jaton MX440 PCI cards each connected to a 17" LCD panel in portrait mode. The machine will boot and load Windows 2000. I can load the Detonator 41.09 drivers for the Ti4200 and the machine boots fine. The moment I load an MX440 driver for either card, it won't boot except in safe mode. Regardless Device Manager shows all 3 cards. If the drivers are loaded, it will show the type of card, otherwise it just says VGA. I've tried freeing up extra IRQs, assigning IRQs to slots, moving cards in slots, having only one PCI card along with the AGP card, increasing the graphics aperature to 256MB. The motherboard BIOS does not have an "Assign IRQ to VGA" as some forum posters have suggested to enable. The PCI display device properties show no resources allocated because the device is not functioning.
If anyone has any suggestions or additional approaches for getting this to work, I would be grateful. I switched to an all nVidia solution to take advantage of the new NVRotate software. The drivers for the Matrox 450 PCI I had purchased don't pivot the display like many of their other cards. I've wrote to Jaton support 2 days ago, but have heard nothing back. Not even an automated reply. Thank you.
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m0rph 2003-01-03 16:02
I had to install each card separately (1 AGP, 2 PCI nvidia badboys), AGP first. Once Windoze booted properly with the AGP, I shutdown and installed my second board. I'm running Win2K Pro; once I rebooted with the PCI board in place, Win2K would allow me to login.... but in the background it was installing the drivers for my PCI card (I knew by the fact that my HD was crunching when I hadn't started any apps. yet). Once I waited for the HD to stop making it's noise, Windoze prompted me to reboot. The same thing happened for my 2nd PCI card.... the third (or was it 4th?) reboot was clean, and my 3 21"ers were purring.
If you already installed the 40.72 detonators for your ABIT, you shouldn't have to install any other drivers for your other two Nvidia cards. Win2K should use the 40.72's since they're now in its arsenal. Make sure the ABIT displays (both of them) show up properly in your Properties before proceeding w/ your next card. Only add ONE card at a time (I can't stress that enuff). Let us know how u fare...
- m0rph
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Aaron 2003-01-04 10:25
I'm running into similar problems. I have purchased four nvidia cards (GF2 TI AGP, GF2 MX200, and two GF4 MX 440's) and can't get Windows 2000 to boot properly with all four (and sometimes three). I previously had four older cards working together but want the opengl in all four screens. I've tried about every combination I can think of to get the cards to work. I've tried one at a time, I've tried all at once. I even tried another GF2 MX 200 and still can't get windows to be stable. If all four are installed at once after the reboot the system detects the nvidia "dualView" hardware and installs in to two of the cards instead of monitors not allowing me to see them through Display Properties. If I install them one at a time usually the fourth will cause windows to freeze once it initializes the cards during boot. Depending on the installation order of the cards it will boot into windows but serveral application error's will occur (explorer.exe, and a couple other system type processes) then it will prompt for CTRL-ALT-DEL sequence despite having login disabled. When CTRL-ALT-DEL is pressed it eventually prompts again in a loop until I manually reset the box. Everything works fine as soon as I remove one of the cards. I'm pondering moving to windows XP with hopes that it will work properly but I'd rather keep that as a last resort. Any help is apprechiated.
-Aaron
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fbrier 2003-01-04 14:13
I tried your suggestion mOrph, several times, to no avail. I even installed each of the MX440 cards separately in another Windows 2000 box and they work fine as a single card. Is it possible that the problem is this TwinView technology? Maybe 2 twin cards can't exist in the same machine, although I haven't read anything to that effect. I'm not using it, but all the cards have it in some fashion. The Abit Ti4200 has a DVI, RGB, and even a TV connection. The two Jaton MX440 PCI cards have RGB and TV. However, I only want to use one monitor on each card. I can't even get as far as Aaron. The moment I load the MX440 drivers with the second card loaded, Windows 2000 Pro locks up on its color load screen. It never loads let alone be unstable.
I found a July 2002 BIOS upgrade for the Abit card that was newer than what shipped with the card a week ago. No difference. No BIOS files posted on the Jaton web site, and based on what random files are out there for random products, I wouldn't hold my breath for a BIOS upgrade.
Any thoughts on getting new BIOS upgrades on these cards? They are mostly reference designs, no? But nVidia doesn't post BIOS upgrades.
Any more suggestions on approaches? I thought perhaps the PCI card was not getting a required IRQ, so I assigned one to the slot - no change. nVidia says to enable the "Assign IRQ to VGA", but my motherboard does not have that option. Besides, I can look at the ABit Ti4200 device property resources and see that it has been assigned an IRQ for the AGP. Thank you again.
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fbrier 2003-01-04 14:34
Aaron have you seen this URL:
http://members.home.nl/marf/Infinite%20Loop.html
Does your problem sound like that?
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m0rph 2003-01-05 07:01
Hmmm... it could be a problem with nView 2.0. It's hard to say cuz it seems like there's no consistency in all the errors everyone is getting. :-\
I had hoped to build a 3-monitor SUPER machine, with nView spanning all 3 monitors (aka Windoze would think that I had a single gigantic monitor). Since spanning is only supported by XP/2K, I installed 2K Pro. But, nView only supports spanning across 2 monitors. So, I had no reason to run Win2K anymore, and decided to (don't laugh!) go BACK to Win98SE! I have *much* more control over 98 than 2K, and seemingly could resolve any/all driver-related issues the OS had. As expected, Detonator drivers installed without a hitch; for fun, I installed 3 dual-vga MX400 cards (1xAGP, 2xPCI) with no problems.
Can you downgrade (or is it *degrade*?) to 98/ME? I know... that's not much of a solution. Not sure if you need 2K for a particular reason.
- m0rph :-D
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fbrier 2003-01-05 16:29
Amazing, but I got it working: 3 monitors ( Mitsubishi 2070SB and 2 Samsung 172T), 3 video cards (Abit Ti4200, and 2 Jaton MX440) using the Detonator 41.09 drivers. The two LCD panels are mounted on either side and the NVRotate has them running in portrait mode. It was one of two problems for me and I am not sure if just one or both were the culprit. I had the PnP OS Aware BIOS setting enabled. I also had the ACPI driver installed under Windows 2000. Unfortunately in the press of time, I did both, mostly because I was trying to get Windows not to share IRQs and that seems to be an issue with the ACPI driver. But it is still sharing. However having the ACPI driver can apparently cause problems as well. I also followed mOrph's suggestion of installing the cards one at a time. Another big source of information was a web page at:
http://www.technologyvault.co.uk/geforce/all_print2.php?prog=gef&lang=en
There are a lot of notes about the nVidia cards so it is definitely worth looking at. It has a lot of hyperlinks to other useful sites. Anyway, thank you, one and all for the help and support!
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drakk 2003-01-19 03:57
Are you able to do 3 monitor gaming with that setup?
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