Mixing it up Geforce GTX 260 and a Geforce FX 5500

I recently bought a PCI (no e) graphics card the fx 5500, desiring a third monitor. I was told that i did not need SLI or Xfire as i did not intend to use both cards for games, i just wish for more display space while programming.

Unfortunately, the FX5500 only works whilst the gtx260 is unplugged from the power, otherwise the system with the displays connected to the gtx260 with some basic driver, even if the gtx260 is disabled and the fx5500 is working properly.

If both the cards are 'installed' in device manager at any one time, the last one to be installed will say that it has problems error code 43.

Any advice on how to get a third monitor up?

Stu

Either get an ATI card or if it has to be Nvidia, something from the 6200 and up. The problem is that while your are attempting to use 2 Nvidia cards they are using different drivers.

The FX 5xxx series doesn't have a Windows 7 driver (WDDM 1.1) and has to rely on the last Vista driver (a beta WDDM 1.0), and it basically cancels out the driver for the 260. The only way to use 2 non WDDM 1.1 cards is if they are a different manufacturer; ATI-Nvidia, Nvidia-ATI, etc. Same thing will happen with ATI cards if you try and run anything from the X19xx series and down with anything from the HD 2xxx and up.

Thank you for your swift response. That sounds exactly like what was going wrong, as every time i would update the driver for one card, the other card would stop working. I am now returning the pci nvidia card to amazon and have purchased an ati one. I did test your theory first by trying out my GFs ati card with the 5500fx and that worked, but i dont want to use that ati card in pci x 16 slot as it was realy crap and would mean not using my gtx260.

An ATI Radeon 9250 PCI with a Geforce gtx260 combo should work.

Stu