Multiple Video Cards on e800???

[BR712506]

I am trying to run multiple video cards on my e800 with no success. I am running XP Pro. One of the cards that I added works, but the on board card and the 2nd card both fail to start. I have tried slot order to avoid shared resources and forcing IRQs, but nothing has helped. Does anyone have any ideas? I really need to get all three cards working.

[CA188158]

Not understanding this

Why do you want to run multiple cards? To use multiple monitors?

This will not work on a PC.

If you want to run multiple monitors, you must have a single video card that can handle multiple monitors, such as a Matrox Parhelia.

check this out

http://www.matrox.com/mga/archive_story/oct2002/video_workstation.cfm

[Jerad_1 · Accepted solution]

Jeremy, I can help you on this one. Forget that last reply. I don't know what compels people to post replies when they don't have a clear answer but oh well. I have been running multiple monitors on my workstations since win2k, its a built in feature. The answer to your question is this: The bios is going to be your problem. This happens with HP and Compaq servers all the time. When you boot up and have changed/added/removed hardware, the changes are written to a hardware profile that the bios calls on boot up. This is what prompts you to save changes or discard when a change is made.

Part of this profile is a probe of the devices function (video) in this case. Once a video card is detected it is assigned an irq and memory address. These servers have 1 pre defined irq/mem setting for all video devices. In other words the last card you put in becomes active and the others are disabled because the bios is told that the old one must be bad and to disable it.

The only option in this particular case falls back on the 1st reply (1 good bit of advice from that post) is to run the Matrox card with multiple heads on it. This way the onboard video gets disabled and the new one becomes active, using only 1 irq/mem.

good luck!

[BR712506]

That's pretty much what I suspected. I did buy a dual out video card from Matrox (prior to that first reply), but I was really hoping that I could somehow make it work with my other viseo card for three screens, whhich is what I had on my last pc. Thanks for the insight.

[Jerad_1]

Any time Jeremy, as you can probably tell from my post this was a road I had already traveled down....

Good Luck!