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Ari 2008-11-14 20:11
Hello to everyone,
I just bought two 9800GTX+ for my new ASUS M3N-HD/HDMI-Deluxe and installed the latest 178.24 drivers. SLI enabled works great - a 3D Mark 6 benchmark blew me away.
I disabled SLI mode so I could connect my 2nd, 3rd and 4th monitors and ran into a problem: Windows XP (SP3) identifies them in an incorrect order. Let me explain what I did and what happens, please bear with me:
1. Boot with one ASUS V191 monitor connected to upper card, inner DVI interface (near MB). Everything's OK and I get a second display detected in Windows Display Properties-->Settings, as "Analog Display". I assume Windows are detecting the 2nd graphics card or the outer interface of the 1st, upper card? (BTW, NVidia Control Panel detects the upper card as 1 of 2).
2. Boot with two ASUS V191 monitors connected to the upper card. Windows detects and identifies the inner interface as display 1, the outer as 3 and an analog display as 2. In NVidia Control Panel, dualview is offered and all is well.
3. Boot with two ASUS V191 monitors connected to the upper card and a third ASUS V191 connected to the inner interface of lower card. Windows detects and identifies the upper inner interface as display 1, the lower inner now as 2 and the upper outer remains as 3. No problem, I think to myself, I'll just switch 2 with 3 so the monitor to the right (on my desk) will be number 2 (I assume that with three monitors, Windows change the polling sequence to: upper inner interface, then lower inner interface, then upper outer interface?). At any rate, I continue
4. Boot with two ASUS V191 monitors connected to the upper card, a third ASUS V191 connected to the inner interface of lower card and a fourth monitor, a Viewsonic 702 connected to the lower card, outer interface. The result: Windows Display Properties-->Settings identifies the upper inner interface as Display 1, the lower inner as 2, the lower outer as 3 and the upper outer as 4. One problem with this, now, is that my third monitor (to the left of the primary display) is detected as 4 and the Viewsonic which is above my primary V191 is detected as 3. OK, I say to myself, I'll reboot with these two monitors switched. In other words, I'll keep the primary V191 on the upper inner interface, the righthand V191 will remain on the lower inner but the lefthand V191 will go on the lower outer and the Viewsonic will go on the upper outer.
The result: no signal to the lefthand V191 from the lower outer interface where the Viewsonic used to be. I disconnected all monitors and started all of the above steps from scratch but still the same result after a couple of hours of reboots and one by one incrementations of monitors connected. The third V191 (lefthand on my desk) still gets no signal. So, I start from scratch again and sequentially connect and reboot the monitors one by one, this time like so: primary V191 on upper inner, righthand V191 on upper outer, lefthand V191 on lower inner and Viewsonic on lower outer.
This way all monitors work fine but the problem is that Windows detects them as so: primary V191 as Display 1, righthand V191 (which is on upper outer) as 4(!), lefthand V191 (which is on lower inner) as 2 and Viewsonic (which is on lower outer) as 3.
Why is this a problem and why have I tired fellow members with all this? Because when I send a window to the next display, it necessarily follows the sequence of detection. In other words, when I send a window from my primary monitor to the next one, the next one is the lefthand monitor, the one after that is the Viewsonic above the primary and the next one after that is the righthand monitor. The sequence is center-->left-->top-->right and for me to be able to quickly send a window to the desired monitor while I'm playing Flight Simulator for eg, I need to go center-->right-->left-->top or at the very least center-->left-->right-->top.
I realize I can right click and select "send window to display n" from the nview menu but that's not what I exactly need while I'm descending to land and have a heavy workload in the cockpit :)
It seems as if once Windows detected the Viewsonic connected to the lower outer interface, no ASUS V191 will get a signal from that output from thereon. It also seems that the polling detection sequence by Windows changes when there's four monitors instead of three. From the sequence upper inner is 1, upper outer is 2 and lower inner is 3 (three monitors), with four monitors I get upper inner is 1, lower inner is 2, lower outer is 3 and upper outer is 4.
Oh, and when I disconnected all monitors except the primary on the upper inner and then booted again with all four monitors connected (instead of rebooting before adding further monitors incrementally), all of a sudden the upper card became card 2 of 2 in NVidia's Control Panel and the sequence was jumbled yet again.
Worst of all, now that I've created a 2nd nview profile consisting of 3 V191 monitors + my TV (SVideo output), when I switch back to the 4-monitor profile, the 4th monitor remains disabled and I have to go to NVidia Control Panel, manually choose dualview for the 2nd of 2 graphics cards, select monitors 3 & 4, apply, and then go to Windows Display Properties-->Settings and rearrange their alignment! Oh, and now all of a sudden, the upper inner interface is display 1, the upper outer is 3, the lower inner is 4 and the lower outer is 2!!
If anybody could help me, I'd really, REALLY appreciate it.
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Christian Studer 2008-11-16 12:03
I'm not aware of a fix for this, but you could use UltraMon instead to move windows, UltraMon uses the arrangement of the monitors to determine next/previous monitor, instead of the monitor numbers.
Christian Studer - www.realtimesoft.com
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Ari 2008-11-17 00:10
Thanks for the reply, Christian.
I'd be more than happy to buy & use UltraMon, as long as there was a good chance I'd resolve the following two issues:
1) Switching between a 4-monitor profile and a 3-monitors + TV (via SVideo) is a one-step, seamless transition because right now, switching nview profiles doesn't do the job. I have to manually select the desired monitors via nVidia Control Panel, even though the profile loaded should have done it by itself, each and every time I switch between the two profiles.
2) I can truly specify the sequence of monitors, which you say UltraMon does.
In a nutshell, will UltraMon work as so:
I've got my 4 monitors in whatever sequence I desire. Then I simply select a "TV" profile, let's say, and boom, I've got three monitors working fine with the TV getting the 4th signal. Later on, when I finish watching what's on my hard drive on the TV, I simply select the "quadview" (let's call it) profile and presto, I'm back to all 4 monitors getting a signal, and importantly, the sequence is correct (no Windows Display Properties fiddling).
One final question: does Ultramon enable full screen video output on a TV? I'm thinking of how previous nVidia drivers, along with nview had this option which nVidia unfortunately axed ever since a year or so ago. Simply put, on my previous PC which had nVidia drivers and nview circa 2006, I'd switch between a dualview profile on two monitors and a clone profile of the primary monitor with my TV. By enabling " full-screen video" for the clone profile, I could play an avi for eg and it would be in full-screen mode on the TV while I could go about my business on the primary monitor (bring to front windows explorer, fiddle with a spreadsheet, bring again to front media player to check remaining time of movie etc) while the wife watched the movie on the TV, courtesy of my PC. nVidia's new drivers & nview don't have this option anymore so I now have to manually send Media Player to the TV (dualview) and I can't clone it on the primary monitor. It's either that or clone the primary with the TV which means an exact clone and hardly the cool "full-screen video".
Does UltraMon offer something along those lines? I'm reading up on UltraMon in the meantime but if you knew whether it would solve these three issues, I'd be most eager to buy it as we watch plenty of movies from my PC and I log lots of hours with a virtual airline (flight simulator) so I'd love to be able to switch profiles (that work properly and offer full-screen video) without problems.
Thanks again for your time.
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Christian Studer 2008-11-17 10:55
UltraMon can't switch between output to a monitor or TV, you would still need to do that via the Nvidia software. But you might be able to use UltraMon display profiles to set monitor position and resolution.
UltraMon can't do video mirroring, where a video playing in a window gets mirrored fullscreen on a secondary monitor. My guess would be that this would need to be done in the display driver.
I would recommend installing the 30-day trial version to see if UltraMon meets your needs.
Christian Studer - www.realtimesoft.com
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Ari 2008-11-17 18:47
An excellent recommendation which I will follow.
Thanks again, Christian.
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