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Good cheap PCI gfx card? (3 monitor setup)

V4NT0M

V4NT0M

V4NT0M

Soldato
Joined
18 Jan 2007
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3 monitor setup problems

I've got 3 monitors hooked up to my PC, i looked around ebay a bit, but the only real PCI card I could find was a Radeon 7000, which I thought would be great, not going to do anything intensive on the third monitor just mainly browsing and text stuff...

However its a little more sluggish than i'd hoped, even just browsing its slow is to render a page, and when loading slows the pc down in general (mouse jumps around etc...)

Am running it at 1280x1024, was wondering if there was any PCI cards people could reccomend that arent really expensive that would give me a little more performance. I'm not familliar with many PCI gfx cards, the last PCI gfx card I owned was a Matrox with 4mb of ram =/ And of course any tips on what I might be doing wrong with my setup would be appreciated.

FYI main GFX card is a Radeon X1600, have tried different drivers on the pci card too :)
 
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TBH that sounds more like a driver problem - your card should be more than adequate for general desktop work as it's only running 2D stuff. We found in the past that running two cards was fine as long as the drivers played nice - since both of yours are ATI I can't see why they wouldn't - just make sure nothing is 'hanging over' the screens from one card to another, and think about scrubbing the drivers and starting again. It really should just work :confused:

Try booting without the X1600, just using the PCI card and see how it performs - might narrow down the problem.

Make sure that when both are running that the x1600 is the Primary.
 
ok, so changed drivers a little more, tried the PCI card without the AGP running, it runs fine on its own... When I have both running the 7000 slows down :(
 
Yep - definitely sounds like a driver/tweaking proble - have a chat to the guys on the Widescreen Gaming Forum - Someone there is bound to have a solution. Anything I suggest from this point would just be guess work unfortunately - alternatively - TBirdUK on this forum has run something similar for a while - I'll get him to have a look at this thread and see if he can come up with anything. ;)
 
Thanks, I'm pretty much beat... Sat up until the early hours of the morning trying driver after driver, gone back as far as catalyst 5.12, still the same the second monitor card lags really bad whever the first is still active.

Tried changing every setting relevant in the display properties and bios...
 
Could you post some more of the specs of the machine - seems to me it could be a possible lack of memory - I had a similar system running with 512MB RAM and when I gave it a Gig it improved quite markedly.
 
The old NF7's weren't a fan of mix and match memory - is that 3 sticks of 512Mb of a 1Gb and a 512 - try just using 1Gb made up of a matched pair of 512's - you'll get tighter timings and better performance...
 
Thats true - could be a memory issue with that in there - also could be a bottleneck from your cpu - have you tried to overclock it (3 screens is quite a lot of processor power)
 
Thanks again for the help, put the cpu up to 2.2GHz and no change. The memory is 3x 512MB Corsair XMS (4200 CAS 2), tried with just two, still no dice. Did a full cmos clear too just for giggles.
 
Bugger - that's me out - what other pci cards have you got in there? Have you tried putting the GFX card in the top pci slot? Have you tried the Omega drivers - might give it a bit of a nudge as they are very well optimized.
 
cavemanoc said:
Bugger - that's me out - what other pci cards have you got in there? Have you tried putting the GFX card in the top pci slot? Have you tried the Omega drivers - might give it a bit of a nudge as they are very well optimized.
Click to expand...
Already in the top slot, my next idea was maybe to remove som of my other pci devices see if theres something wrong there...

Tried the omega drivers already (4 different versions) :(

Just tried re-installing my mobo drivers too =/
 
Sorry - I'm definitely out now - it's probably a simple tweak in the nvidia control panel somewhere - I'd ask on the WidescreenGaming Forum - someone there will have an answer I'm sure. :(
 
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