Yet another multimonitor question

A

AAAintheBeltway

Ok, finally got around to hooking up that incredibly cheap Dell. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my old stb S3 Virge dualhead pci card to work with the new setup. Not surprising, it's 5 years old at least. Anyway, the new pc has an ATI Rage agp card and o/s is xp home.

What's my best bet for adding two more monitors? Has anyone used a matrox 450 or something similar with the ATI card? Will xp home support using two single monitor pci cards plus the agp card, and if so, is that better than using an additional dualhead?
 
Yes, XP (Home) will support an AGP card (e.g., a Matrox dual head) and at least 2 PCI video cards (which can be fairly low-end, e.g., 1-2 MB) on the same mobo (depending on how many free PCI slots your have, of course), for four monitors total, which is what I'm running.

XP will reject --i.e, fail to respond to-- some of the old cards, but just keep swapping out parts and something will work. (Anything with a S3 Trio chip is a fairly sure bet.)

Charlie
 
Howzit AAA

Charlie is on the money. Despite what many say on this site, whacking in another card or combination of different cards is not a dangerous practice, esp if using 98, 2000 or XP. - even if
you have mutli-headed cards which require their own software ! I have messed around with so many combinations of cards that providing the card is not too old, or, as i have seen with some, not built to be used in mutli-monitor setups, you should be fine.

In your case either another multi-head pci card, or a couple of single pci cards - providing they are not "too old" [if you want to do it on the cheap] should work with XP. Out of the two ignoring cost I would probably favour the former, but in use there would be no real difference.

Cheers
 
Quote from charliehm:

Yes, XP (Home) will support an AGP card (e.g., a Matrox dual head) and at least 2 PCI video cards (which can be fairly low-end, e.g., 1-2 MB) on the same mobo (depending on how many free PCI slots your have, of course), for four monitors total, which is what I'm running.

XP will reject --i.e, fail to respond to-- some of the old cards, but just keep swapping out parts and something will work. (Anything with a S3 Trio chip is a fairly sure bet.)

Charlie
More...

Charlie,

Are you saying there is a limit of four monitors with xp? I've got four pci slots plus the agp. I'm only running three monitors now, but if I can free up some table space I might want to go to 6 or so.
 
Quote from AAAintheBeltway:



Charlie,

Are you saying there is a limit of four monitors with xp? I've got four pci slots plus the agp. I'm only running three monitors now, but if I can free up some table space I might want to go to 6 or so.
More...

I'm running 7 monitors on XP right now. There is not a limit of 4.
 
you will be limited to only 4 if you put in single card heads into each slot....buying dual heads or more is a tricky business....this has come up b4....best bet is to go Matrox...if not, make sure if you go with a PCI dual head you get a dual VGA analog card...dont get the split one where one is DVI, and the other analog...if your running CRT's it will not matter...however many LCD's are very sensitive to this setup....often the second analog LCD will have a very fuzzy crappy like pic when running through the DVI/VGA adapter... especially ATI stuff
 
Pop 4 quad cards in for 16. I think you may be limited to 10 by XP OS though. Personally, I could never handle more than 4. Too distracting.
 
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