help with my screens?

conuk

conuk

conuk

Associate
Joined
5 Jan 2005
Posts
2,110
Location
Engerland :)
ok I got the following :

dell 2407
NEC 19" lcd as second monitor.

Running a 8800 GTX for both monitors...

what I would like to do is use my 32" HD tv for movies and bluray hopefully.

I have an Intel Bad Axe II mobo .... can I just pop in another PCI Express gfx card in there to use for the TV ?

Its not an SLI board......

Thoughts ?
 
The bad axe 2 will happily run 2 nvidia graphics cards in non sli, I had an 8800gts and a 7300gt happily in mine while trying to setup a 2 player game of ut2004 under linux (quad core and 4gb is so excessive for an oldish game it had to work! Never did though, keyboard numbers were too random :(). I also booted windows and no problems.

You can't game on both monitors at the same time (at least easily, as I found out) though so why not get a cheap video oriented card for the tv? Lower electric bill, cooler room no need for a fan on it so quieter. Just a thought :)
 
nah I dont want to game on both monitors.... just if I want to watch something from the computer .... just flick on the TV instead of sitting at the desk all the time ... I still want two monitors for the PC but would like to watch movies on HD TV sometimes... via another DVI card... so I guess something not too powerful would suffice ?

As youve got the bad axe 2 - you may be able to answer another question if I can mate.

The sata ports on the mobo - Ive got 2 x raptors in raid..... and 2 more sata drives as backup..... (the blue ports)... Ive bought some more bigger drives and wanted to copy the data from the backups onto the new ones.... whenever I put another drive onto the red sata ports (not to boot - just for data) - the PC dont boot up... any suggestions ?
 
Your board sounds different to mine, at least in colour. I have 4 black ports which are the true onboard ones (positioned nearest the inner edge of the board), which I managed to get 3 drives max to run from (adding a 4th resulted in no boot no matter which was where), and 3 blue ones and a red that are the marvel ones at the bottom. Unfortunately I don't use the blue or red ones as I have no need, just adds about 5 seconds to boot time and I don't want that :p

It's also possible the bios is playing with the boot order of the drives, as the true onboard ones will probably take priority. Never used raid on this board to know what it's listed as, but whatever it may be make sure the added drives are at the bottom of the drive list and windows should resist the urge to rename all your partitions, and will hopefully boot.

As for the graphics card a 8800gtx is definitely not the best card, it doesn't do any of the video decoding for hd, so assuming this box has a good cpu (I'd hope so if you game with a gtx on it!) you'd just as well run any card that can handle the res required and has a dvi port. Like a 7300gt... (lowest priced card that doesn't steal system RAM, at least it was when I got one :)) If you wan't hd content to play though you'll need to look into hdcp, I believe there is a software bypass but it hasn't been of interest to me yet.

Good luck with the drives :)
 
my bad.... yeah the sata colours are same as yours....
was just quoting from (rubbish) memory .... shame I just wanted to copy them over then disconnect them - will have to go a different way.

Chip is QX 6700 - ok for now ;)
am using a dell 24" monitor @ 1920 x 1200
the tv is a 1080p compatible 32" screen ... I assume its HDCP compatible but not sure... so yeah a cheaper card would probably do - ill keep an eye out in the members market.

cheers orange.
 
Indeed, plenty of life left in 65nm cpu's. New cpu = new mobo, and I already tried that once but came back to the bad axe. If only speedstep in Linux worked with non default vcore I'd be very happy with it still. Looking into volt mods just to change voltage without bios knowing, but almost seems a shame to mod a board that is near perfect already.

No joy with the boot order list? Seems strange that something as simple as hard drives can cause such an issue with this mobo but now it's not just me it seems to be a reality :(
 
yep tried the boot list order - no joy.

seems a strange waste of sata ports.... talk about dangling a carrot ;)

I assumed if there was say 8 sata ports .. you could use 8 drives or something ... strange.
 
as for the graphics cards......

Ive just got one of those Asus Sonar PCI express sound cards.... are the 3 pci slots the same ?

are 2 of them 16x and 1 slower.... ?

and can I put a non nvidia card in there or is it better to pop another slower/cheaper nvidia card in ?

cheers
 
The top one pci-e is 16x if used alone, if you use the second the top one drops to 8x and the other 8x are used for the second. The bottom one is always 4x, which should be plenty for a sound card. Just a thought though, did I read somewhere ages ago that the gtx needed a 16x slot? I'd test with the 2 gtx's before splashing out on a new card.

I've heard of problems running both ATI and nvidia drivers in the same system, but onboard intel and either being fine... seems a bit of a gamble if you were to go non nvidia as there are few non ATI cards about. May as well get an nvidia to be safe.
 
just checked about the board....

1 x 16 pci slot .... or multiple 8 x cards can be used = dead end.

would a DVI splitter from the 19" monitor work - its currently running 1280 x 1024 .... pretty sure my LG TV does this res....

so one dvi from the 8800gtx runs the dell 24" monitor... and a splitter runs the LCD tv and 19" monitor.... thus windows just thinks theres 2 monitors with the TV and 19" displaying the same screen.

Would this work ? otherwise Im stuck with this board :(
 
The gts also supposedly needs a 16x slot but mine was quite happy running in 8x mode. 16x is overkill for bandwidth anyway and there was no performance decrease with my gts. It's worth trying them both in together especially as there will be no new drivers to leave mess...

As for splitter I'm not a fan (quality usually suffers) but if you spend enough this probably wont be a problem. Also the tv is widescreen while the 19" monitor isn't so while it will probably display a picture at 1280x1024 whether you can make it fullscreen (and indeed how well it retains quality while scaling up the smaller res) will also need to be tested.

Sounds like you have a weekend of experimentation ahead :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom