3 x PCI Video Cards In Win XP?

[arokh]

Is it possible to use 3 PCI video cards in windows xp? If so, what am I doing wrong. No matter what slots I try them in, I can get one working, but the other two say "device cannot start" in device manager. The motherboard has onboard agp video, and I cannot disable it in the BIOS, but have so disabled it in device manager in windows. Any thoughts on this one? I thought maybe it was a set of incompatible video cards, what I have in front of me are 3 X SIS305 series 32mb pci video cards. I also tried some SIS6326 4MB pci cards, but they didn't work either.

Thanks,
/|rokh

[Kermit D. Frog]

I know it's none of my business, but what might you be wanting to do with 3 video cards???:confused:

[flyguy42]

I would assume he has 3 monitors. :)

[FatalException0E]

Have you made sure that those cards (and their drivers) are compatible with multi-monitor setups in windows?

[bobo]

I have found that when sharing video cards in windows xp, a good thing to do is to go into the bios of the motherboard and look for a setting which says something like "boot from pci/agp video card first" and usually its set to agp. If you change it to pci, then save the settings, for some reason windows xp likes it better. Now i am assuming that because the onboard video is agp, then that is causing the issue. Just try it, change the setting to boot from pci and make sure you have monitors hooked up to all the video ports and see what happens.

[nunob]

You might check the mobo for a jumper to disable the onboard video. If you know the manufacturer of the mobo you can get the jumper settings from their website.

[arokh]

Thanks for all your suggestions, but I got it working now. I was able to use the onboard video for one display, and 2 pci cards to get 3 working displays. It took a while getting the video cards in the right slots on the board, but it finally worked out in the end.

[Ya_know]

Originally posted by Kermit D. Frog
I know it's none of my business, but what might you be wanting to do with 3 video cards???:confused:


Word...

[arokh]

to satisfy your curiosity, they bought the machine for a specific purpose. Basically what they do is go to kids sporting events in which they take picture of the "action". Then they use a powerpoint like presentation to scroll the pictures on 2 of the monitors (maybe one monitor per team's pictures, I'm not sure). As the parents walk by they can purchase the picture if they like it, so on the main primary monitor they control the system and print out a photo quality picture.

Works very well for what they want now that we got it figured out :->