This post is more than 5 years old
6 Posts
0
21067
How to make use of the onboard Radeon HD 4200 in the Dell Studio XPS 7100?
This machine's motherboard uses the AMD 785G chipset, which includes a Radeon HD 4200 with DVI & HDMI outputs.
However, as the machine may also have a dedicated graphics card (in my case a Radeon HD 5870), Dell and/or ATI have very kindly set the bios to automatically disable the onboard GPU when a dedicated graphics card is installed.
I would like to make use of the onboard Radeon HD 4200 to drive an additional 1 or 2 monitors. (alongside the HD 5870 which is already driving it's limit of 3 monitors)
There are no bios options for controlling whether the onboard graphics chipset is utilized or not.
Does anyone know of a software or firmware tool that can be used to force the onboard graphics chipset to function?
Kelbear1
1.5K Posts
1
June 29th, 2011 11:00
No. This is just the way all systems work. Your option would be to get an inexpensive PCI video card if the slot is open.
TehJumpingJawa
6 Posts
0
June 29th, 2011 11:00
After a thorough trawl of the 'net, you appear to be correct - or atleast nobody has succeeded with it yet.
A bit of a shame; I wonder if it's an entirely artificial limitation, or if there is some technical reason behind it too. (perhaps the onboard gpu requires the use of the PCIe bus)