Dual Video Cards in Studio 540

you must diable your vedio card first. right click on my computer, click on manage, then click on device manager, then click on display adapters, right click on your viedo  and disable. a box will come up click ok then restart your computer.. if your new card is i place turn off your computer and remove your new card restart, then do the above. after you have deleated the drivers for your new card., reinstall your card and follow the steps in your instalation book. this how i instalied my card. i had the same problem

good luck,

bob

Bob,

Thanks for the reply.  Can you confirm that you have 2 video cards in your system, one PCI and one PCI Express X16?  That is what I'm trying to do but it sure seems like it is not seeing the second video card.

I can try this later today but I am not optimistic that it will solve anything.  I created a new partition and installed a new OS and it had the same issues.  Also, when booting the machine I expect to see that all 3 monitors have the same boot display screen displayed on each monitor.  However, nothing is showing on the monitors hooked to the video card in the PCI slot.

Again, I am thinking this is perhaps a bios issue.  I don't see anywhere in the bios to disable the onboard video.  Perhaps they detect the video card and auto-disable one of them?

Thanks,
Gerry

FYI for anyone else considering buying this machine--I talked to Dell support yesterday and they confirmed that the machine will not work with 2 video cards.  It appears it is a bios issue as the bios is dumbed down and doesn't let you specify which video card gets priority, etc.

So a word of warning in case you were thinking of this machine--I was going to use it with 3 monitors but now cannot.  Another thing is that now that Dell is charging a 15% restocking fee you can't just return the machine unless something is "wrong" with the machine.  In their opinion there was nothing wrong with the machine even though you can't really use the PCI slot (at least not with a video card in it if there is another video card in the X16 slot).

Gerry

Gerry,

Unfortunately this isn't an answer to your specific question but your post caught my attention.

I have a Vostro 200 running XP and I currently have an ASUS EAH3450 in the PCI express x16 slot running 2 monitors.  Can I add another card to the PCI slot so I can run 4 monitors?  It looks like you did this by adding the x1050 card.  What exact card (make/model) did you add?  Can you mix ATI with AGP?  Do I have to cahnge out the Power Supply?

Sorry about all the questions but I'm really not that technical on how to accomplish the 4 monitor setup and have had a heck of atime trying to figure this out without bying a new sytem.  I am going to use it for stock trading.  Any advice and guidance you can provide will be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

Tim,

 I bought this card (http://www.visiontek.com/products/cards/retail/x1050_PCIe.html) only it was the PCI version.  I'm not sure what you mean by mixing ATI with AGP.  You have an card that uses an ATI driver (Catalyst).  AGP was an only style bus option before PCI express.

Essentially just buy any PCI card that uses an ATI chipset and you'll be fine--you want to only have to install the catalyst drivers (e.g. don't buy Nvidia).  Here are a bunch:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2000380048%201069609642%201305520549&name=ATI

Gerry

Gerry,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.  The x1050 card you bought had to be low profile...Right?  I see that some of those on the link may not necessarily fit in the case.  As you stated, I should try and buy one of those on the linked site but I'm sure it has to be low profile like my EAH3450 card.  I just wanted to try and emulate what you had since it worked for you.

Thanks again,

Tim

Tim,

No need for it to be low profile.

Gerry

Gerry,

I have a slim tower therefore I would need a low profile.  I didn't make it clear earlier which 200 I had.  Sorry...

I have been searching and searching for one that will fit my PCI slot.  As I stated earlier, I currently have an ASUS EAH3450 in the PCIe x16 slot which works great.  If I could only find another dual output card that fits the PCI slot so I could have 4 monitors would be great.  I will keep searching.

Thanks again,

Tim

Gerry,

   Any luck on this?  Did Dell give you any indication if a future Bios update would support two video cards?  I'm assuming the on-board Intel chipset won't act as a secondary.

  I just bought this system and need to run three monitors...

  Thanks,

    Greg

Greg,

I'm pretty sure that we are out of luck on this machine if we want to run3 monitors.  i'd say return it if you really want that feature.  However, Dell won't acknowledge this as a defect and so will slap you with the 15% restocking fee.  Because I bought mine pretty cheaply and then they offered me money to keep it i just decided to keep it.

The onboard won't act as a secondary--it gets auto disabled the moment you put in a card in the x16 slot.  I think about the only option would to try and find the original OEM motherboard vendor and figure out a way to flash their BIOS onto the board.

Gerry

Gerry,

   Thanks for the response - every 5 years or so I buy a pre-built computer and I remember why I prefer to build my own.  Unfortunately I'm kind of committed now to the Studio - the reason I got it is due to my work schedule as I don't have the time to build from the ground up (old computer blew up).  Playing with the BIOS from an OEM perspective is a good idea, but even if I do get it to work, I might as well have spent the time building another rig. 

   I could buy a USB adaptor, but the refresh on those are horrible and while far from HD, I do like showing the occasional video on the 3rd monitor given my rather unique set-up.  Och!  Get a powerhouse machine and you get slammed on simple things like a lackluster BIOS - problem with prebuilt systems is it is very difficult to do proper research on things like this and it's where you get nabbed.  If I do find a way around it in the future I'll make sure to update this thread - though I may just be hoping for Dell to update the BIOS to something more functional.

Thanks

I know this is kind of late, but just thought I'd comment on here before anyone else reads this thread and decides to give up hooking up two cards to this machine.  I have this machine and have successfully hooked up two video cards to it and have had 3 monitors up and running at the same time.  The problem I ran into was Vista and its heterogeneous graphics adapters handling. http://www.microsoft.com/taiwan/whdc/device/display/multimonVista.mspx

Basically Vista wasn't happy with the second graphics card because it didn't have the same WDDM drivers as the primary one.  There is no way around this in Vista as far as I can tell.  I wanted to make sure that it really was the OS and not the Bios as was stated above so I installed Windows XP onto another partition.  After installing the drivers for my two video cards XP was able to utilize them just fine and I had 3 monitors working.

Windows 7 comes out in a couple months and thankfully Microsoft has decided to fix this "feature" of Vista so we should be able to use two graphics cards on a 64-bit OS.

Hope this helps,

Frank

Gerry wrote:

> I have a slim tower... I currently have an ASUS EAH3450 in the PCIe x16 slot which works great. If I could only find another dual output card that fits the PCI slot so I could have 4 monitors would be great.

Thanks for the recommendation for a two-monitor video card.

About adding a 2nd video card -- especially to a slim tower.  I was just looking at our Vostro 200 supplies.  The mini tower has a 400 watt supply, the slim has a 250 watt supply.  That's according to affordablesurplus.com, which is a poorly recommended website (according to resellerratings.com), and looks like the website is not being maintained (search functions and stock-information functions aren't working), but maybe the power-supply information is correct.

I don't know how to check if two video cards are too many for a 250 watt supply, but discussions seem to name them as the biggest reason for upgrading power supplies.  I guess if your two video cards work on the stock supply, then it's good.  If there are unexplained crashes, perhaps with both video cards and a hard drive and an optical drive all spinning at the same time, that would indicate the power supply is being pushed too hard.