9800pro hardware device manager issues - help

[Rickyohead]

i'm having a weird experience getting my ati radeon 9800pro to install correctly and appear ONCE in the device manager. It might be affecting game performance, i'm not sure yet. I believe I did everything correctly when switching out my old nvidia card.

first I uninstalled all previous nvidia display drivers and software, then shut down the computer, removed card, installed 9800pro, booted into windows and used CD to install ATI drivers, restarted, etc. I also updated the catalyst and directx drivers online.

Then one day I noticed in my device manager, 2 graphics cards--the second one identical to the first but said " - Secondary" at the end. I've tried disabling the Secondary card or removing the device, but once I restart windows the annoying "found new hardware" pops up in the system tray and re-installs it as "ATI Radeon Pro 9800 - Secondary." Right now it stopped the loop because I disabled it and there's a red X through it.

Could this interfere with performance? I have a feeling my card has never been working correctly from the begining. Any suggestions?

athlon xp 1800+
1gb pc2100
Windows XP SP2

 

[ronnn]

This is normal, just how Ati recognizes the potential second monitor.

 

[LTC8K6]

It should appear twice. Any card that has dual RAMDACS to drive 2 monitors will appear twice in device manager. That is normal.

 

[Rickyohead]

no sh*t. okay, um... time to get another monitor!

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm not entirely sure, but it's possible that if both RAMDACs and their associated CRTC circuitry are running, they will be using up a small amount of read memory bandwidth to drive the output. I'm no longer using the secondary output on my 9200, so I've disabled it in Device Manager. Looks like you've done the same. Deleting it entirely will simply cause it to be re-installed on the next reboot, as you've discovered.

Even wierder, on my FIC 64MB R9200, the primary shows up as an "ECS 128MB Radeon 9200", whereas the secondary shows up as a 64MB FIC model. Some wierd PCI PnP device-id/subvendor-id thing, I guess.

 

[LTC8K6]

There are probably people out there trying to get rid of that pesky second P4 processor in device manager too.