Triple Screen troubles

[prongs]

Hi there,

I recently added a fairly old PCI card to my 8800 PCIe Card running on windows 7 on a gigabyte GA 965P S3 and cannot get three screens working together...

With the BIOS set to use PCI first,

Windows boots on the PCI Card, The other two screens do not come on, Both cards are visible in device manager, only one card is shown in the Screen Resolution options.

With the BIOS set to use PEG first,

Windows boots on the 8800, two screens on, pci card off, pci card NOT visible in device manager, pci card not shown in the screen resolution options...

There doesnt appear to be any other bios settings to do with the screens.... im at a bit of a loss as to what to try next...

I would consider buying a PCIe x1 card to work along side the PCIe x16 card, will this not work for any other reason??

Any ideas anyone?
Cheers in advance!

 

[stormy13]

prongs, welcome to the forums.

You forgot to mention what the old PCI card is. If it is also a Nvidia card, that would be the problem; as both cards would be using some of the same driver files, and some different (WDDM 1.1 and WDDM 1.0), with Windows not initializing/enabling the non-boot card.

 

[prongs]

Thanks stormy,

To be honest I don't exactly know, it probably is written on it somewhere, ill have a good look when I get home tonight, if it is what you say, what can I do to get around this problem? I read that people often buy two of the same card and don't have any troubles...

 

[stormy13]

That would be because the two cards are the same make and model, or at least from the same generation and use the same driver.

 

[prongs]

Fair enough,

But isn't using an old PCI card pretty common to support a third screen, that would never be anything like the model of a PCIe card...

 

[torrentg]

Sure. They make pretty decent PCI cards that use WDDM 1.1

They're readily available on Newegg and Tigerdirect.

 

[prongs]

Alrighty, ill take a look, cheers!

Would i also be able to use 1 PCIe-x1 and 1 PCIe-x16 instead of the PCI and PCIe-x16?

Any reason to go for one of these options over the other?

 

[torrentg]

If you have an available PCI-e x1 slot not being used, you should get one of those cards.

If not, PCI should be fine.

You'll be best off getting another NVIDIA card to match what you have already, as long as it uses WDDM 1.1.

If you don't know, we can tell you.

 

[prongs]

Alrighty, thanks again
I might look around for a PCIe-x1 card...

 

[prongs]

Hmmm so,

I got a PCIe x1 card, its a GeForce 8400 GS WDDM v1.1 alongside my PCIe x16 Geforce 8800GTX WDDM v1.1

The display is detected but isnt coming on,
no problems in device manager but is this the problem that theyre both the same WDDM version or something??

Cheers!

 

[torrentg]

No problem. Install the latest driver from NVIDIA's site by running the .exe.

Should be good.

 

[prongs]

Yeah tried that already... installed all fine. no changes though

If i pull out my PCIe x16 card the PCIe x1 one works so i dont think theres any hardware fault...

 

[torrentg]

Check the bios for settings that may do something.

Also, disable any unused ports like floppy, parallel, serial, com...etc

 

[prongs]

Solved it!
I changed the bios setting from PEG (Boot PCIe first) to PCI (Boot PCI First) and the PCIe x1 card booted the bios on display instead and then both displayed in windows no worries...

So um yeah - that to me makes completely no sense but oh well,

thanks for all the tips everyone!

 

[apants]

I run 4 x ASUS 22" If you think that makes no sense ^^^

I was stuffed why I couldnt get all 4 working, let alone install a new driver update from Nvidia. Sometimes three would work sometimes 1. I had two identical XFX 9800 GTX+ cards. Win 7.

It turned out .. and I was dumbfounded. That all the OS needed was the correct Monitor drivers first (asus)
I have never ever, ever never had to install a monitor driver for a windows OS in my 18 years of using them. (maybe win 3.1)

And thats how I fixed it for my issues.