3 display problem

deanm007

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Mar 1, 2011
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i have the following setup:

Ati Radeon HD 5550 installed on express x16 slot.
Ati 9200 PCI card installed on a standard pci slot.

I bought the latter for a 3rd monitor setup since on amd's website, It showed that both of these graphics card used the catalyst control center. But now, when I try to open the catalyst control center software, it says, your current gpu is not supported. So I have uninstalled the catalyst software.

I have 3 displays working(spanning), however, i am only able to change the resolution for the monitors connected to the ati 9200 through display properties. Display props does not show a 3rd monitor. The other monitor connected to the ati hd 5550 has a huge resolution which I cannot change thru windows xp. How do I do this?

thanks
 

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
Let me see if I can break this all down for you. The 5xxx series does support 3 monitors, but you need to use the display port (DP) for this to work. Seeing as your 5550 doesn't have a DP, you can only run two monitors off of it. You could use the 9200, but it can't use the driver that the 5550 uses. You need to grab the legacy driver off of AMDs website for cards that old. And because you need to use two different drivers its good your using XP as Vista can only load one video driver.
 

deanm007

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Hey thanks for the reply. But the problem is that when I install the driver for the 9200, the hd 5550 automaticaly gets disabled and The two monitors connected on it have no display. Device manager shows an exclamation point on the ati 5550 device. In the Dell bios, I can only pick either the pci as primary or the peg as primary. Then the other card should work right? But it doesn't. Before I was having only resolution issues, but no display at all from my ati 5550.
 

deanm007

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System specs:

Windows xp sp3
Pentium 4 cpu with HT 3.2 ghz
I have 4 gb of memory in there but xp always saw only 3 and after putting in pci card, it sees 2.75 gb of memory.

I finally got all 3 monitors to work in a spanning motion. And the only way I was able to do that is by setting the standard pci card as the primary one in bios and not loading any drivers for the pci card(ati 9200). Otherwise the pc just doesn't see the third monitor.

Now the hd 5550 is working great and device manager is reporting no issues with it. However, the yellow mark on the ati 9200 is still there and it is because I need to load the driver. But if I load the driver, the other driver for the two monitors on the hd 5550 won't work.

As of now, I can live with one screen without the driver. Although it is a pain because without the driver installed for the ati 9200, the graphics on this monitor is mediocre. When I move or scroll down in a window, its very slow to react.

Maybe somebody can give me a specific way to get these two drivers to work together under my specs.

P.S. I have removed ccc from my system.

 

deanm007

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I just did that and now the yellow mark is on the agp card. Here's what windows help center says:

Are your display adapters correctly positioned on the PCI bus?

Your primary display adapter should be installed in the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slot 0 or 1. This slot is usually the farthest from the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) slots and nearest the edge of the motherboard. This display adapter should be connected to your primary monitor.
If you are using both PCI and Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) display adapters, the PCI display adapter must be installed in the first PCI slot on your computer.
Note

If you have an AGP display adapter and a PCI display adapter installed, most computers select the PCI card as the primary display adapter because the PCI bus is enumerated before the AGP bus. This enumeration is a function of your computer's BIOS and is not controlled by the Windows operating system.

To use an AGP card as the primary display adapter, and a PCI card as the secondary, one of the following conditions must exist:

The computer's BIOS must support the enumeration of the AGP bus before the PCI bus.
The PCI display adapter must have the option to disable VGA functionality at the hardware level. Check the documentation for your PCI display adapter for information about disabling VGA functionality.

I'm going to try these things