Windows 7 - Issues with NVIDIA GeForce 6200

I have a Gateway FX6840. It has an ATI Radeon HD 5700. I had two monitors going just fine. I can run WoW with most of the graphics options turned all the way up and I still get 60 fps. I had a third monitor so I decided to put it to use. I went out and grabbed my NVIDIA GeForce 6200 and tossed it in my PCI slot. I plugged in my third monitor, and it works. The issue is that whenever I utilize my new video card, my frame rates get destroyed. With my third monitor going, my frame rate on WoW drops below 30 and has trouble staying above 15. If my third monitor is completely idle then my frame rate is fine. Only if I have a program running on that monitor are there any issues. Also, whenever I log into my computer with three monitors on it takes forever. When I first turned on the third monitor, all three screens went black and it took forever for them to come back. I already tried updating all of my video card drivers. I'm guessing it has something to do with the driver.

Any help would really be appreciated.

Lol, this is obvious. Your GeForce 6200 is just rubbish at gaming. That why this is happening. If you would like to have 3 monitors, and can't use your current video card to power all 3, your best bet is to just buy a new video card.

Slasher

I did buy a new video card. Perhaps you are misunderstanding. My current video card is powering my first two monitors. It works great. The 6200 won't work well with gaming. I understand that. I'm not putting anything like that on the third monitor. Even if I'm not gaming on any of my monitors the third monitor, the one on the 6200 card, is complete crap and causes my other two monitors to be horribly choppy. It should at least be able to handle simple applications.

IF you are using the 6200 on a 2nd PCIe slot, your are halving the bandwidth for both.

I have never tried to mix ati and nvida cards on the same pc at the same time but a 6200 is an old card might be better off grabbing a card off new egg thats ati just not so old as that 6200

guitardude77, welcome to the Seven Forums.

With it being a Gateway there is likely to be limited bios options, but have a good look around in the bios and see if there is any option for setting which video card is the default card. It could be that if the setting is there that it is setting the PCI card as the primary card.

Also while in there, and give your owners manual a good once over; see if it is possible to use the onboard graphics with the video card at the same time. I'm assuming yours has it from the quick start guide for that model,

Gateway Support - FX6840*Gateway FX6840 Desktop Series

Another possibility that is causing it is that the two cards are using a different driver model, not to be confused with that they are using different drivers (AMD and Nvidia).

Windows Display Driver Model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 6200 is a DirectX 9 card and is limited to using the WDDM 1.0, where the HD 5770/5750 is a DirectX 11 card and uses the WDDM 1,1. It is possible that instead of disabling one of the drivers (which happens to those that try and run a similar setup but with cards from the same manufacturer; AMD with AMD, Nvidia with Nvidia; and the newer card won't work at all), it is forcing the AMD driver to fall back to the older driver model. One reason for suggesting using the onboard video if you can, as it will use the same WDDM 1.1 as the HD 5770, albeit an Intel driver.

I really appreciate your effort Stormy. I went through all of the BIOS options and there is nothing in there about my video cards. I didn't find anything in the quick start manual that could help me out. As far as using the built in video card on my motherboard, there is another video port. I don't know if there is a way to activate it or not, but it doesn't show up in device manager under display adapters. I tried plugging the third monitor into that port and it basically does nothing. It doesn't detect it in changed display settings in the control panel.

I was looking at some details about the 6200 and I found that under "Driver key" was "{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001". Looks like some registry thingy to me. I googled it and found this:

CHECK THIS: Avalon.reg performance increase - 9xx Soldiers Sans Frontiers | Google Groups

I was looking at Champion's post. Haven't tried anything in there yet. I'm wondering if you would have any better suggestions.

This is strange since you have the onboard. The setting may be buried in a sub-menu somewhere, Advanced/Onboard, or CMOS. It may be something you have to set to manual before you can see it too. There should be something to the effect of default Video/Graphics, Onboard or PEG. PEG would be PCIe graphics.

It would not surprise me if an appliance PC like a Gateway lacked BIOS settings to choose the graphics card. The motherboard may disable the onboard graphics if a card is inserted in the primary graphics slot. The simple test for that would be to remove the discrete graphics card and plug the monitor in to the onboard port.