Question for those with 2 monitors (with 2 video cards, not Dual Head)

[Noriaki]

If I had a Radeon 64MB + 19" and a V3-PCI + 17" is there a setting somewhere to let you disable the secondary? If I was playing quake or whatever I woudln't want my V3 to hurt performance, I'd just shut it off and use the Radeon + 19" for Quake (or UT or whatever)
I also want to do that for DVD playing probably...though for that I could just turn off the 2nd screen so it wasn't showing anything...

anyways can you dynamically kill the secondary in windows ?

 

[snow patrol]

Yes. Just go to Display-->Properties-->Settings and uncheck the 'extend my windows desktop to this monitor' box. 🙂 Quake 3 actually won't run unless you do this, btw.

 

[Noriaki]

And then my Q3 will perform as fast as it would if the V3 wasn't even there?

Excellent *Mr. Burns finger thing*

Damn that's going to be cool..it's going to be hard to wait until Xmas 😛

 

[snow patrol]

Yep, as long as the Radeon is the Primary card (which it will be considering that it's in the AGP slot), then games will use that basically and it won't matter how slow your other card is. So have the Radeon plugged into your main monitor and the Voodoo 3 into the 'lesser' monitor.

🙂

 

[urbantechie]

OT: Had to break the Snow Man icon!

 

[Noriaki]

LOL @ urbantechie

Yeah Snow the Radeon + 19" will definately be set to primary, my BIOS lets me pick and I'll definately pick AGP as primary.

Thanks for the tips.

Now I really want my 2nd monitor 😛

 

[Soccerman]

now I'm confused. u saying that because you have the 2nd video card, even when running games on the faster card, the performance is SLOWER then what it would be with just the one video card?

 

[BA]

I don't think it will be any slower, but both cards have to support the video mode you're using. I had a TNT2 and a Millenium on dual, and I'd have to disable the Millenium before I could play CS in OpenGL.

 

[snow patrol]

Soccerman - nope not at all! 🙂 He was wondering if that would be the case, but I was saying that it definitely wouldn't be and that the speed of the second video card would have no affect on the Radeon's speed.

 

[Noriaki]

<< but both cards have to support the video mode you're using. >>



That's only if I want to use both right?

I only want to use the 19&quot; + Radeon for games, the V3+17&quot; is for programming and stuff, it's handy to have a 2nd monitor, but for games I just want the V3 off and out of the way. But it seems like that should be no problem.




<< now I'm confused. u saying that because you have the 2nd video card, even when running games on the faster card, the performance is SLOWER then what it would be with just the one video card? >>



No soccer I don't even have the dual video card setup right now, it's just a What-If, I just wanted to make sure that having the 2nd video card would in no way affect the performance of my games using the primary, and it seems that it won't, so I'm happy.

Thanks for the help guys.