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Need help setting up a Multi-monitor display

D

DEredita

Senior member


I have (3) 19" monitors that I want to hook up in a mulit-monitor display - what exactly do I need? Can this be done - I have Windows XP.

- Mike
 
What you need is either:

a) A graphics card with two outputs - most recent ATI cards have this functionality. I think most recent NVidia cards do as well.
b) A second (PCI) video card that works as a secondary display - most modern PCI graphics cards will work. (Older "junk" PCI cards won't, I've tried 😛)

Windows XP has fairly robust support for multiple displays. Once the second monitor is hooked up, Windows should detect it and give you options on the Display control panel.
 
You'll need both a dual output AGP card and a single output PCI card for 3 monitors.

An ATI PCI card will not work as a secondary display unless it is at least a Radeon. I had/have a Matrox Millenium II as my secondary display card for years, but I think it's having compatibility problems now. It'd be nice to have both primary and secondary cards made by the same company ATI/Nvidia to minimize compatibility issues. I'm sure there are people running both in one box, but unless you already have the cards, you might as well buy compatible stuff. 🙂
 
The biggest problem is that with the older cards, they all try to grab the "standard VGA" hardware resources (mem from A0000-BFFFF, and various ports), and won't share. Newer cards can either have their VGA core disabled, or their resources re-mapped to other addresses, so that they won't conflict. The BIOS needs to use those resources (on one and only one card), but Windows' can get along totally without if need be. (That's also why the BIOS has an option for AGP/PCI video priority - the one that you select, is assigned those "standard VGA" resources at boot.) Older Matrox Millenium PCI cards have a physical hardware DIP switch to disable the VGA core/resource usage, they work pretty well as secondary display cards.
 
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