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adding 3rd monitor
The help section says that you can have multiple monitors, but I can't get this to work.
I have a dual monitor set up on my Dell 8300, P4/3.0/HT/800fsb board. I am using an nvdia ge force 5200 that came with it and it has a dual output, one dig, one analog. I use an optional Dell offered adapter for the digital out to convert it to VGA. Works great, no configuring at all. I have 'screen spreader' enabled.
I've been trying for hours to add a (known good)3rd monitor to my system and I can't seem to get any of the 3 diff video cards that I have available recognized. They are old spares, but they all work fine for running dual monitors in a compaq presario 98SE machine.
In this Dell 8300, the matrox/compaq video card was ok in dev manager, but wasn't recognized anywhere in Display Prop/Settings. The S3 trio's 32/64's caused a yellow asterisk in Dev Manager and they also weren't in Display Properties. I tried all the t/s steps with each card , to find a solution, like updating drivers, the hardware troubleshooter steps, xp updates, and different PCI slots, #1 and #4 for all 3 cards and I'm out of ideas
I read some where in the hours of troubleshooting/reading, that if you use a mix of an AGP and a PCI card, the PCI has to be in the #1 slot, and it will always be the primary. ( I wonder if I did get these 3 working, if having an old card with probably 2 or 8 megs of memory on it would affect the overall performance of the better card in the AGP slot) Maybe call this question #3 if it applies.
I did try to find a HCL to see if the devices will be compatible in this computer, but I just get directed to the commercial MS site that has compatible devices for sale.
I took out the agp card (5200) and the PCI S3 worked fine by itself Seems like a compatibility issue between the cards, but I hope there is a way to can get them all to work together.
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The short of it are these 2 questions:
1. Is there a URL to pull up an HCL by vendor for XP ?
2. Are there any issues that I haven't addressed in order to successfuly add the 3rd monitor ? Something in the Bios setup ?
thx for any ideas
trevor
DELL-Chris M
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April 15th, 2004 18:00
Welcome to the Dell Community Forum (DCF).
Sounds like you have coverd the bases. List everything in the PCI slots.
vadolphous
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April 16th, 2004 03:00
vadolphous
3 Posts
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April 16th, 2004 03:00
hi, thx for the reply. I tried the one thing that I should have thought of earlier, before
all the r&r'ing, and it did allow me to use a PCI slot video card.
I changed the bios setting: primary video... AGP, to the only other choice, which was AUTO. This enabled the card to work. (duh!).
But....as I was asking about in the initial post, my performance seemed to sufffer using this card and I removed it for the time being. One thing I discovered was that even though 'help' said it would become or needed to be, the primary video card, when I checked in Display Properties, I discoved that the #2 monitor, (the one plugged into the anolog output of the dual AGP card),had made itself the primary, and also discovered the checkbox option, 'make this my primary monitor'.
So I ask the question again, do you think this old 2-4 MB card will affect the overall performace ? When I get ahold of a more modern PCI card, I'll find out, but a reply would be appreciated too.
thx again and have a nice evening