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water 2005-11-16 08:17
my specs:
IS7 abit mobo, 1gb ram, XP pro,
xfx 6600GT AGP, Chaintech 5200 PCI
displays:
2 lcd + 2 crt
Nvidia driver:
81.94 forceware winxp2k
OK today something happened to my 6600 + Radeon 9250 combination *(see below) and I was forced to revisit the 5200 and the frustrating problem of how to successfully install both the 5200 and the 6600. I got same result as before, ie. no success, despite using the new drivers and repeating the steps in the release notes several times.
I spent hours on this (reinstalling XP too), until basically I was doing random this and that and getting nowhere.
Then I played around with the BIOS, rebooting after every change. Also no luck. But then after rebooting for the 300th time (exaggerating) it worked! I don't mean that all 4 displays lit up, just that the drivers stuck to the 6600 for once after a reboot. The top 2 displays were black (5200) BUT the bottom 2 (6600) looked *normal*, showing spanned dual head instead of reverting back to generic drivers and clone displays as it had been doing all day.
So I right-clicked the desktop and checked out the video cards...and saw not 2 but 4 monitors on the map. The 6600 displays were active and the 5200 displays were greyed out. I moved them into a 2x2 grid (they had been in a row side by side) and was prompted "Do you want to enable this monitor?"
You bet!
My solution was simply changing 1,2,3 or 4 settings in the BIOS:
assign IRQ to video - disable
pci vga palette snoop - disable
agp aperture changed from 128 to 256
Maybe I did one other thing right, maybe a bunch of things. I don't know, I didn't take notes, but it was right after raising agp aperture to 256 that the problem went away. I'm not sure if it's a combination of things (new driver, reinstall xp, along with the bios changes) or just that one change that finally did the trick but I am happy to just leave all the settings as they are now.
* Just to recap:
When I tried the 2 cards out of the box a few months ago, I could never get the cards to see each other. So I ditched the 5200 and used an ATI 9250 instead.
Today I took out the ATI to vacuum the inside of the case, walking the ATI card over to the window to blast it with some canned air. When I reinstalled the card into the pci slot the machine would not boot! It'd reve up but freeze on a black screen. When I took out the ATI the computer worked. I repeated this at least 10 times. I think my stupidly walking over the carpet created enough static to kill the card...
So with nothing to lose I popped in the 5200...and again met with no success. Same musical chairs as before, install driver, uninstall driver, reboot dozens of times. I started out optimistically as I using the most recent Nvidia drivers and the pdf release notes had a hopeful section about how to install 2 Nvidia cards in the same box. Basically, the instructions were: install the drivers manually for card A, then install the drivers manually for card B.
I'm going to sleep now.
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ECarlson 2005-11-17 13:43
Thanks for posting your success story. Maybe it will help others resolve similar issues.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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