IP35 Pro, Setting up 8600GTS on 16x, 7600GT on 4x

[delsvr]

As the title indicates, I have an abit IP35 Pro, and I just recently thought to make use of my idle 7600GT by changing my dual display from using my one 8600GTS to sharing the load with a 7600GT.

I'm having some troubles though. When Vista starts up, the screens constantly seem to restart, going black and then back to display. It does this for a good 30 sec., when afterwards it seems to stabalize and Vista reports that my display card died but that it was "recovered." One time even after having recovered, I got a blue screen and the system restarted. Anytime a new window pops up or I do something even slightly GPU-related, the screens flicker again and the displays restart.

I'm also seeing some weird artifacts on the background of my display on the 7600GT (connected to a 4x PCI-e); thin blue dashes scattered across the background.


Has anyone had any experience with a setup like this? I'm thinking my problems could be either with putting a 7600GT on a 4x or having just plugged in the new card and changed the display configuration without telling Vista. Is there something special I need to do?

 

[delsvr]

Found the problem. nTune was using OC configurations that I had set for the 8600 GTS on my 7600GT and it was bugging out. Apparently nTune can't overclock just one or the other video card with a setup like this; its core bus clock frequencies apply to both GPUs. Oh well.

 

[JBT]

Wait why are you doing this? Share the load? its the OS. I think you are just making more trouble for your self with 2 video cards...

 

[delsvr]

When I setup dual monitors on my one 8600GTS it feels like it takes a performance hit as the card now has to render two screens. So I figure if I put one screen on another card, the 7600GT, the 8600 will be back to rendering one dedicated screen.

I'm not sure how exactly to measure the difference, but it seems like a few games are running a little smoother.

Hypothetically, I'm thinking I can play a video on one screen while playing a game on the other without either lagging too much.

BTW, RivaTuner is working great as my nTune replacement and configures the two cards separately, as expected.

 

[XBoxLPU]

Rendering two screens is not hampering the 8600GTS. Further more dual monitors and games usually don't play together in the first place and I think it is possible for an easy way disabling of the second monitor before launching games.