Running more than one PCI card on a HP 220 MT

George · External Since: Jul 22, 2005 Posts: 1

I have two cards running on this machine. I have the on board monitor
card and the top PCI card. Each time I enable the third PCI card it
freezes and indicates that the driver could not be initialized.

PattyL · External Since: May 09, 2004 Posts: 191

It's possible that the third video card you have is not compatible with the
other two (or one of them).

Try removing the other PCI card and test to see if it works correctly with
your onboard AGP. Try changing the slots of the PCI cards. That could make
a difference.

Check on this site to see if you can find anyone else that has been able to
use the same configuration.

http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/db.asp

Check with the manufacturer(s) of the cards for any information that they
might post on using their hardware with multiple displays. Some PCI cards
will only work when they are the primary adapter. If you have two of these,
then it won't work. Not all PCI cards play nicely with multimonitor. One
solution is to get a PCI card with dual ports. This is working nicely on my
husband's system (Nvidia AGP and dual PCI). Mine works fine with an ATI AGP
card and 2 elderly S3 PCI cards.

PattyL

"George" <tkooiman.DeleteThis@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:1122054832.297281.93100@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>I have two cards running on this machine. I have the on board monitor
> card and the top PCI card. Each time I enable the third PCI card it
> freezes and indicates that the driver could not be initialized.
>

Techgeek · Joined: Apr 30, 2009 Posts: 5

Are all three of your video cards the same? It's not good to use NVidia with ATI either. They usually won't work, and if they do, you will get a lot of crashes. I recommend ATI for Multi-Monitors and Mix matched video card Chipsets. They tend to do a lot better. NVidia is probably better for Gaming on a single screen with SLI.

The Three main ways to Setup Multiple Monitors

1) You can buy a pre-manufactured multi-monitor computer. The best place to purchase a multiple monitor computer is at:
Multi-Monitors.com. They carry a multi-monitor computer line called SUPER-PC that can support from 2 to 12 monitors.

Multi-Screen Computer Systems

Multiple Monitor LCD Displays

2) You can get a USB to VGA Adapter, or USB to DVI Adapter that will allow you to add an extra monitor to your computer
via any USB2.0 Port. You can also add multiple extra monitors by using multiple adapters. This is a great option for viewing
documents, surfing the web, using Microsoft Office and many other business tasks. This is not a good option for intense
graphical situations such as HDTV, Blu-ray, Gaming and 3D / CAD Workstation applications. For those types of scenarios,
it is highly recommended that you purchase a high-powered multi-monitor workstation or a Matrox Dual or Triple Head2Go.

Multiple Monitor Adapters

3) You can replace or add an extra video card to your existing computer, depending on how many monitors you wish to support. Although this sounds easy enough, this is a rather complex solution for a beginner, especially when trying to find a compatible graphics card. For this reason, I am going to write an entirely seperate post on that topic and will link to it here, very soon.

Multi-Monitor Graphics Cards

Once you have your multiple monitor system set up and ready to use, you will need to enable all of your monitors in
your “Display Properties” Control Panel. Here is a great link to a complete and animated walkthrough of how to enable
your multiple monitors in Windows.

How to Setup Multiple Monitors (Instructions)

This is what it will look like when you are done:

Multi-Monitor Video Demo 1
Multi-Monitor Video Demo 2