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Tom 2007-11-07 02:37
Hello!
I've been running 2 monitors on my PCI-E Geforce 6600GT for a while, which worked like a charm. Recently I've bought a 32" LCD TV and figured I'd connect it to the PC as well. So I ordered an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card (big mistake?).
So I plugged it in and ambitiously installed the drivers for it, and it's been trouble ever since. I've done numerous clean starts (safe mode, remove everything that's ATI/NVIDIA, run driver cleaner, reboot) and tried all kinds of different orders of installing the drivers.
This thread on this forum seemed very promising, but I've not gotten it to work for me. Basicly what happens is:
1. I install drivers for the PCI or PCI-E card first (letting windows install it, pointing it to the directory the drivers are in, to prevent installing control panels and other crap), while having that card set as primary in the bios.
2. I reboot and install the drivers for the other card (setting this card to primary in the bios does not seem to make a difference).
3. I reboot and at this point only the LAST installed driver is functioning. If the last installed card is set as primary in the bios, the other screen simply doesn't receive a signal, and when I open the display settings, I get this error: "The currently selected graphics display driver can not be used. It was written for a previous version of Windows, and is no longer comptabile with this version of windows (...)".
If the last installed card is not the primary card in the bios, windows loads the default VGA drivers for the first installed (primary in bios) card and I get a signal on both screens, but it obviously looks really ugly, with the primary screen stuck at 640x480@4 bit.
So what it seems to boil down to is: only the last installed driver will work properly.
I'm about ready to just give up, take my loss and get another PCI card :( Any further help or confirmation that this simply cannot be done would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
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zain 2007-11-10 09:04
Hello there,
I read about a lot of these similar problems that people had by mixing ATI and nVidia cards. I currently have a 6800 in my PCI-e slot and a 6200 in my PCI slot, and they both work beautifully together.
When you're going to put two different video cards in your computer, stick with one brand. Don't mix and match.
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rtangwai 2007-11-10 10:25
What operating system are you using? Vista really dislikes different video card drivers mixed together, even if they are from the same manufacturer eg. ATI Catalyst drivers 6.11 and 7.10 together. XP is pretty good at mixing - I've gotten 4 different cards (Matrox, ATI, nVidia, and 3dfx) working in XP at the same time, but that was an AGP/PCI situation, not PCI-Express. Windows 98 SE really doesn't give a hoot what you mix in so long as the video BIOS doesn't demand it must be the primary card eg. ATI Rage Pro.
Robert A. Tang-wai
Chief Technology Officer
reBOOT Canada
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Tom 2007-11-12 21:02
Thanks! I'm using windows XP, and ended up throwing in the towel and getting a PCI geforce card, which instantly worked, gladly.
So I've learned (a $50) lesson: don't try to mix NVIDIA and ATI.
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