Keith B. Kurek 2005-09-07 07:59
If your computer has an on-motherboard AGP card, and an empty AGP slot, can you run monitors off of both AGP cards? I have an S3 Graphics DDR card apparently hardwired into my computer, and I bought a NVidia GEForce 5200 AGP card to use with it. I installed the latest drivers for both from the website successfully. They will NOT work together at the same time, even though my two old NVidia TNT PCI cards will still put out a picture to their respective two monitors, as they always have. In fact, when the NVidia GEForce 5200 AGP card is plugged in, the S3 AGP Card disappears entirely from the Windows XP Device Manager. When the NVidia AGP card is removed, but its driver not uninstalled, the S3 AGP card functions again, it reappears in the XP Device Manager, and all mention of the NVidia card's uninstalled driver disappears. I go through all of the various troubleshooting functions looking specifically for compatibility conflicts in both instances, and the computer specifically tells me that there are none. In looking through Google results, I've found some hits talking about the unlikelihood or impossibility of two AGP cards functioning at one time, but they usually seem to be referring to the fact that computers don't seem to [commonly?] come with two AGP slots, and do not address using your on-board AGP card ALONG WITH the extra purchased AGP card in the AGP slot. Is the purpose of the extra AGP slot merely to give the user a chance to buy and use a better single card, and is it simply impossible to use both? When I went into bios on my Pentium 3 (and yes, I have of course made the AGP come before the PCIs), I found several AGP settings I had never heard of. One was called AGP aperature size and was set to 64mb; as my second AGP card was 128, I set it first to 128 and then to 256. No luck. There were 3 other AGP BIOS settings: AGP Mode, AGP comp driving (auto or manual), and Manual AGP Comp Driving (with 2 character spaces of all kinds of alphanumeric charcter settings). Is THIS where the secret of getting two AGP cards to work might be found? The young guy who sold me the AGP card seemed to think it would work; all of his previous advice with multi mon PCI use was good. Unfortunately, he's no longer at that store, and everyone else in the Lansing area seems to be clueless about multiple monitors without the use of dual-monitor cards, like at the State Transportation Ofice I used to work at where I was introduced to the latter. Thanks - KBK
KBK
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