Three monitors on Vista?

[Gabor]

Hey guys,

I have a brand-new Dell Optiplex 745 with Windows Vista Ultimate. I'm
trying to get it to drive three monitors.

For this purpose, I've bought:
- a Gigabyte ATI Radeon X1650 PCI Express card with 2 DVI outputs
- an EVGA e-GeFoce FX 5500 PCI card with 1 DVI output

After turning off the motherboard's built-in graphics adapter, I tried
to get this setup to work on my Dell. I got the PCI Express card to
run but the PCI GeForce would always error out (the Device Manager
shows a little warning icon).

I've tried to swap in my friend's ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card as well,
with no luck. Putting that card in instead of the GeForce made Windows
freeze during startup.

Any clues? Maybe I could buy another combination of cards to get this
whole setup to run on Vista.

Thanks a lot!

Gabor

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

For multiple monitors to work with Vista, the display adapters have to
(essentially) be the same - must use the same driver - see
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=929456.

Since you have a mixture of NVIDIA and ATI display adapters, these won't use
the same driver and thus can't be used with Vista.

 

[Gabor]

Bruce,

I've now ordered a PCI card with an ATI Radeon X1550 chipset. I
believe the driver for both cards (X1650 PCIE and X1550) is the same
(ATI Catalyst V7.4), so that should work.

Thanks for your help!

Gabor

 

[Spirit]

A mix of Video Cards and/or one of these would work.

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/corpo/products/home.php#gxm