Windows 7: Onboard Graphics for Dual Display

My question here is can I use the onboard graphics for a second display?

The answer to that can only be given by ASUS, or someone who has this board and has tried it.

Some motherboards allow this and some don't. You should contact ASUS customer support and ask.

Have you tried adding a video card and connecting a second monitor to the motherboard?

Cheers!
Robert

I don't think generally this is possible with PCI-E motherboards. I know it was often possible on AGP based MB's. But In a PCI-E based MB, the onboard graphics uses the PCI-E bus to access main memory. Therefore the onboard graphics and the discrete video card would need to use the same resources, so it is one or the other. That is why generally, plugging in a PCI-E GPU automatically disables the onboard graphics. A Guy

My board only has one PCI-E lane so no.

Why not just run the second off your 8600 GT? Unless you have some hacked up version of the card that only has one connection on it, it is more than capable of running two monitors (usually a combination of DVI, VGA and HDMI or s-video).

More than possible. ATI/AMD has had it for quite a while on motherboards with their chipset and onboard video known as SurroundView,

ATI Hybrid Graphics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

all it takes is any ATI card to enable it (and it works very well). Nvidia also has it but only works with specific chipsets and video cards,

Scalable Link Interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and more and more laptops are coming with the same thing mainly on the newer i3 and i5 based ones, using the integrated Intel graphics (integrated in the CPU) for general use and switching over to the dedicated video (seen it with both ATI and Nvidia cards). Not sure if this will or does work with the desktop versions of these CPU's, haven't seen any reports one way or the other yet.

i use to use that until i figured that it was plain better to use my GPU for the second as it would not use much of the V-ram or power. rather then haveing my second screen take a bite out of my on board ram.