Three heads are better than one (hopefully)

Topher · Post by **Topher** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 6:01 pm

I have a Radeon 9800 AGP which drives my original two monitors. Now I picked up a third one and plopped an older PCI GeForce 2 MX in to drive it. I got everything up and running, but using the machine is like trudging through mud. The CPU is idle most of the time so I'm guessing it's slow to respond because of some kind of I/O bottle neck. Maybe because there's a video card on the PCI bus? Or because there's two video cards?

If this isn't the right way to do three heads, anyone know of a better way? (aside from buying like the one card that has three outputs)

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 6:54 pm

Don't mix Nvidia and ATI cards in the same system...

Hunt around for IRQ sharing, etc.

Topher · Post by **Topher** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 8:14 pm

I think you're absolutely right. The GF2MX was sharing IRQ 9 with a bunch of other things. My roommate had a Voodoo3 which I put in, Windows put it on IRQ 10 and now my system is zipping.

As far as I can tell though, there is no way to move IRQs once they are set correct? It would be nice to use the Geforce card instead of my roommates.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 8:57 pm

Put the MX card in a different PCI slot, or reassign the IRQs in BIOS if you can.

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Sun Aug 14, 2005 12:40 pm

You probably have ACPI on, which will share hardware on a common IRQ.