Can you run three monitors using a dual-head AGP card & a PCI card

[Grog]

Can you run three monitors using a dual-head AGP card & a PCI card? They would all be ATI built cards running CRTs

Thanks

[Peter M]

In general, as long as all the VGA units involved are multi-VGA capable, yes you can. Above that, you need all involved drivers to play nice with each others.

If it's all Radeons, then I'd say you should be fine.

[DallasDon]

Yes, you can. Simply install the card and drivers, and reboot.

Right click the wallpaper, go to properties, click settings.

Should have three monitors in the window.

Select each one in the pop up tab, and check Extend my desktop unto this monitor.

This setting should be 'independent" mode. There is also Spanning, across all three monitors, and Cloning, all monitors display the same thing.

The only combo of multi monitors that will not work is onboard and AGP card. The onboard uses the AGP bus, and disables the onboard vid as soon as an AGP card is installed.

[Grog]

Wow !!! Thanks for the fast replys. I'm looking at replacing the 16mb agp in my Dell 4400. I picked up an ati 64mb pci card for $20 at a walmart that was trying to get rid of it. The thought was to get a 128 agp card for my main monitor and run the pci to a 2nd monitor. The thought of three sounded too good to be true (on a budget) but that is a possibilty now...

Thanks again

[Peter M]

If you're going to stick with two then you're definitely best off running them both off the AGP card. PCI VGA is a huge system bandwidth hog.

Radeon 9200SE w/ dual head capability is less than $50!

[Grog]

I will use a dual head card if I stick with two monitors. Thanks for the facts behind the reasoning tho