PCI and AGP can i use both at the same time?

[soundude462]

i have 5 monitors that i got for free. they are all in perfect
condition. the only problem is that i can't use them all. i have a
" Gforce fx 5500 OC AGP 256mb ddr" video card and i also
have a cheap "PCI ati rage pro 8mb" my goal is to use as
many of my monitors on a single computer as possiable. i have an
extra computer that i also use multiple monitors on. the motherboard
has a hardwired video that i haven't actually been able to figure out
how to disable it (i uninstalled the driver but that odviously didn't
help and i tried to disable it in the bios but im not sure if it
actually worked) i got the nvidea AGP card to work amazingly i love
it(this computer doesn't like agp cards unless its invidia, it likes
to restart continously or give me viscious messages) and i then tried
to install the pci card and it shows up in device manager as not able
to start. so i found a more recent driver and that fixed the problem
evertying was working fine excpet i couldn't turn on the video. i
went to display settings and it doesn't show up there. nothing was
coming out of the monitors i tried. did i commit some mortal sin or
something . i fix computers on the side and this is kinda driving me
crazy. im glad i finally got a video card to atleast work. would a
pci version of the nvidea work better. is using the AGP disabling the
pci graphics. the onboard video is disabled when the AGP card is in.
when i take the agp card out the onboard video comes back up. i
cannot use both at the same time. my goal is to get some cheap pci
cards so i can have as many monitors as possible. the computer is an
HP pavillon a420n with 2.16GHZ 3000+ amd athlon win xp home 768 mb
ram. i fix home computers as a side job for freinds family and their
friends. iv been at it for a while and i cant even figure out my own
computer. id like some help.

 

[First of One]

i have 5 monitors that i got for free. they are all in perfect
condition. the only problem is that i can't use them all. i have a
" Gforce fx 5500 OC AGP 256mb ddr" video card and i also
have a cheap "PCI ati rage pro 8mb" my goal is to use as
many of my monitors on a single computer as possiable.

*Theoretically*, multiple monitors on multiple cards should work fine as
long as the drivers for all the cards support multi-monitor. Inserting a
card into the AGP slot should not disable PCI video cards.

The latest Rage Pro drivers for XP is WXP-J5-30-1-B02.EXE , are you using
that?

would a
pci version of the nvidea work better. is using the AGP disabling the
pci graphics. the onboard video is disabled when the AGP card is in.
when i take the agp card out the onboard video comes back up. i
cannot use both at the same time.

I had an IBM like that, where the onboard video was hard-wired to disable
itself when an add-in video card was detected. In your case, though, the
onboard video is NOT on the PCI bus. It is in the VIA KM400 northbridge.

Have you tried using the Rage Pro PCI card by itself? If that works, go into
the motherboard BIOS and look for an option called "video boot priority" or
something like that. Set it to initialize PCI video cards first, then AGP
cards.