Chris Bowen 2004-06-06 10:55
HI all.
I currently have a pair of 17" LCDs running from the VGA and DVI outputs of a ATI 9800pro.
I would like to purchase a PCI card to run the second LCD to get DVI output on both screens. Potentially, I could add another monitor to the mix and run 2x from the 9800pro and 1x from the 9200.
Will the 9800pro AGP and the 9200 PCI happily co-exist ? Is anyone else running this config, or, should I get maybe a nvidia 5200 PCI instead so each card runs it's own driver ?
The other thing I'd like to achieve here is the ability to run by Fusion DTV PCI video card on BOTH LCDs. Currenly my DTV tuner card will only run on the PRIMARY display (something about an OVERLAY) ... I can't drag it over or run it on the secondary display.
If I was to get either a 5200PCI or a 9200PCI.. could I then get the DTV tuner card to run on either the primary or secondary ? This would be a BONUS if possible.
Cheers
Chris
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William Morgan 2004-06-06 15:16
A ATI PCI 9200 will work very nicly with your 9800 AGP card. As for your TV issue... frommy research.... the TV is limited to the primary monitor.
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Chris Bowen 2004-06-07 11:02
Hm. My impression of the limitation of the DTV cards to display on the PRIMARY display was due to the card tying up the 'overlay' in the driver on the primary video card/display card.
I would have thought that with 2 cards of different brands, that 2 types of overlay would be in the drivers, therefore, it may not be OK to 'drag' an active DTV window from one to the other, but at minimum it should allow you to select from the DTV config an 'overlay' type .. then you should be able to chose which display driver should run it ?
T1000
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ecarlson 2004-06-07 11:48
I can drag my TV window from my LeadTek WinFast 2000 TV card to either monitor, and one is driven by an onboard SIS controller, and the other by an NVidia PCI card. I could also do the same when I had both monitors on my NVidia Ti4200 card. I guess either the ATI card has overlay limitations that other cards don't, or perhaps your TV software has the limitation.
- Eric www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Peter Ng 2004-06-07 23:31
overlay should only work on the primary monitor. depending on the software used, once you drag the playing window to another monitor, it will either display a blank screen (overlay only mode) or it will still play the video, but will be using some other method to display the video. it's kind of like the overlay/primary setting toggle in wintv pci video cards. in this second mode, cpu usage is significantly increased however. it also doesn't look as smooth.
i know media player automatically switches modes depending on which monitor it's dragged to. and i think i've managed to get dscaler to do the same too, but i'm not too sure how. i no longer have a tv card in my system so i can't say for sure.
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ecarlson 2004-06-08 14:12
Overlay mode works fine on both my primary and secondary monitors as I mentioned above. I guess ATI based cards only support overlay on the primary.
Non-overlay mode is choppy on my somewhat old system, so I never use it.
- Eric www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Frank 2004-06-11 06:23
FYI - According to ATI, using a AGP and PCI video card is not a supported area for ATI. I put together a ATI 9800 and 9200 cards and everytimg I tried to use the TV portion, it would error out. This was due to the PCI card. When the PCI card was removed, the TV function would work normally.
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ecarlson 2004-06-11 10:38
Yes, I've heard (here) that the TV part of ATI cards stops working when you use 2 video cards. I have a separate TV card, so that wouldn't affect me even if I did have ATI cards.
- Eric www.InvisibleRobot.com
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hammer 2004-06-30 15:29
Yeah I have a ATI AIW 9800PRO pushing 1 NEC/MITSUBISHI FP2141SB monitor and two (2) ATI 9200 128MB PCI cards each pushing 1 NEC/MITSUBISHI FP2141SB monitors for a total of three.
I originally had a 9800PRO (without the AIW) as the primary AGP card but i would get corruption when playing fullscreen games so I changed to AIW and have had no corruption.
The limitation concerning the "hardware video overlay" is correct. Different programs will react differntly but none of the programs I use like to be dragged from one monitor to the next when underway. I haven't read enough about it to say, but I sure thought that each video card should have it's own "hardware video overlay". It follows that you could play a seperate DVD on each monitor simultaneously. Unfortunately this has not been my expierence.
I have had the most luck with zoomplayer. Other than the "hardware video overlay" issues this setup seems to work fine with the latest catalyst.
Then only preformance complaint I have is that the "color palette" of the AGP card is "blue" or "cold" compared to the two PCI cards which appear "yellow" or "warmer". It's quite noticable when I stretch a windows explorer window across all three monitors. On the 9800PRO the background looks white but on the two 9200 monitors it looks yellow. Maybe I need to make some tweaks. I mean maybe its "user error".
Also if I had it to do over I would have gone with Nvidia because ATI doesn't let me have the taskbar extend all the way across all three monitors.
However in the winter I can shut the heat vent in the room where my 3 22" CRT monitors are and it's still warmer than the rest of the house.
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