New ATI cards

[MonkeyWrench4000]

I have always used Nvidia graphics cards, and have just recently purchased 3 ati 9550 video cards to install in 3 office computers that i put together.

My question is: why do i see two video cards installed? "Radeon 9550" and "Radeon 9550 secondary" ??

At first i assumed that ati's setup was different, and that it always had dual monitor support enabled, and ran as two seperate cards under windows. Is this true or am i wrong? Will this slow the card? Is there anyway to disable the secondary card? (or will it be fine the way it is?)

Thanks for helping an ATI newb.

 

[MisterChief]

Don't worry about it. Just stay with the primary profile, you'll be fine.

 

[rbV5]

Its the second RAMDAC (both actually) there is no reason to try and disable the device manager entry at all.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: MonkeyWrench4000
At first i assumed that ati's setup was different, and that it always had dual monitor support enabled, and ran as two seperate cards under windows. Is this true or am i wrong? Will this slow the card? Is there anyway to disable the secondary card? (or will it be fine the way it is?)

That's exactly it, and as others have stated, there is no reason to disable the 2nd listing even if you run a single monitor setup.

 

[MonkeyWrench4000]

oh ok great. Sound like everything is in order then. Thanks again for the quick replies.

 

[ScrewFace]

Doesn't the secondary use an IRQ? If so, it would be a good idea to disable it and free up and IRQ, wouldn't it?

 

[LTC8K6]

There shouldn't be any need to free up IRQ's anymore. You'd have to have an old system to be worried about that.

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: ScrewFace
Doesn't the secondary use an IRQ? If so, it would be a good idea to disable it and free up and IRQ, wouldn't it?

Actually, it does not take an extra IRQ anyway. If you look at Device Manager Resources by connection, you'll see that the ATI card still uses a single IRQ for the whole card.

Like LTC8K6 also says, if you are using ACPI HAL, then it wouldn't be an issue even if it were to use a seperate IRQ.