Two video cards on same motherboard?

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt (More info?)

I'd like to have WFW, Win 95, Win98SE and Win2000 on my system. The cards that I am
looking to purchase won't support WFW, Win95. I have an old Diamond Viper card that will.
Seeing that current higher end video cards that I'm interested in don't support Win95,
WFW. Is it possible to have two video cards on the same motherboard. Would it just be a
matter of supplying the correct drivers at install for each OS? Perhaps the OS won't see
the "wrong" video card as long as it isn't setup with the drivers and install parameters
of the "wrong" card?

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt (More info?)

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 14:33:59 GMT, Fitz McKay <fitz_mckay2@earthlink.net>
wrote:

>I'd like to have WFW, Win 95, Win98SE and Win2000 on my system. The cards that I am
>looking to purchase won't support WFW, Win95. I have an old Diamond Viper card that will.
>Seeing that current higher end video cards that I'm interested in don't support Win95,
>WFW. Is it possible to have two video cards on the same motherboard. Would it just be a
>matter of supplying the correct drivers at install for each OS? Perhaps the OS won't see
>the "wrong" video card as long as it isn't setup with the drivers and install parameters
>of the "wrong" card?

Both can be resident in the motherboard slots, then when you don't have
an OS driver the OS will still see the video card but you can disable
that video card in Device Manager. The other card will then be the
primary display adapter for that OS. However, your bios will determine
which card is initialized as the primary adapter when the system POSTS and
while booting to the OS, so whichever you choose as the BIOS primary, you
won't have video from the other card until the OS (that's running that
card) has loaded it's driver.

You don't need to worry about when to supply (what) driver, you can keep
the monitor hooked up to whichever card is set as the bios primary and run
in VGA mode until you later install the correct driver for whichever card.

One thing that i'm wondering is why you need those oldest operating
systems. Are you certain that Win98SE or WinXP wouldn't support your
needs?