9600pro - two display adapters showing in the device manager?

[Sunny129]

i just built a system with a 9600pro by Sapphire. after installing winXP, the system detected to display adapters. i installed the catalyst drivers for one of them and left the other one alone. upon restart, the system would hang just before the desktop would load. after resetting, i would get a message in DOS saying that windows did not restart correctly, and then it gave me some options, one of which was to start up with the last known configuration that worked. when i got into windows, the display was using a default display adapter, i.e. the catalyst drivers were uninstalled. so this time i installed the drivers one one display adapter in the device manager and removed the other device (by the way, the mobo is an NF7, so there is no onboard video). this time the reboot went fine and i got back to windows, but windows detected the display adapter i deleted the time before, so again i had two display adapters in my device manager, one 9600pro, and and unknown display adapter. so this time i installed the catalyst dirvers on the 2nd adapter. the device manager then said i had two 9600pro's...a "9600pro" and a "9600pro secondary." anyways, everything works fine now, but it just seems odd that i have two of the same display adapters showing up in my device manager. i thought maybe it might have something to do w/ ATI's version of dual monitor support, but as i recall, my nVidia Ti4200 had nView support, and there is still only one display adapter showing in the device manager. has anyone here had this problem?

 

[John]

My 9700 & 9800 Pro also has (2) entries in the device manager. This is by design. When you update drivers, run Driver Cleaner and then simply reboot the PC and run the Catalyst setup utility in the future.

 

[Sunny129]

so wait, are you saying that by running driver cleaner first, then running the catalyst setup utility, i should only get one display adapter in the device manager? or will there still be two? i'm fine with 2 if thats the way it was meant to be. otherwise, i'm assuming this is how you fix the problem...

i just built this system from scratch by the way, so there were no drivers installed that needed to be cleaned off the system. maybe it was the fact that i didnt use the catalyst setup utility to begin with, and instead let windows search the catalyst disk for drivers and install them itself?

 

[pillage2001]

There will be two seeing that there's a DVI and VGA out.

 

[Sunny129]

Originally posted by: pillage2001
There will be two seeing that there's a DVI and VGA out.

my ti4200 in my other system has both DVI and VGA out, but there arent two Ti4200's in my device manager...

 

[SexyK]

Pillage is right, it's designed to handle multi-mon setups. Either way, you have nothing to worry about, thats completely normal for a ATI setup.

 

[Sunny129]

ok thanks...thats all i need to know. if its normal for the device manager to show two display adapters, then i won't mess with it.

 

[vailr]

My Radeon 8500 AGP has both the VGA and the DVI ports, but has always only shown a single display adapter in System Manager.

 

[BaboonGuy]

ati has hyperthreading! yet another reason ati > nvidia!!

 

[mosco]

my radeon 9600 does this too.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: vailr
My Radeon 8500 AGP has both the VGA and the DVI ports, but has always only shown a single display adapter in System Manager.

My 8500LE was the same as yours, but my 9600 Pro has 2 entries.