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Stupid Question

M

mdmcaf

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 23, 2011
Messages
68
So I haven't built a new computer in about 10 years (tragic, I know). But I've finally saved up enough money to build a brand spanking new and beautifully fast i7 machine. With the last computer I built (which was an AMD AthlonXP 1800+) I was able to get three monitors running by using a video card on the AGP bus with two video ports and another video card on the PCI bus with one port. I'm building a new computer next week using an Asus P8P67 motherboard.

I already have an XFX Radeon 4870 that has two DVI ports so I can run two monitors off of that but the P8P67, unlike my current motherboard, doesn't have an onboard video port for me to add a third monitor. I already have a Radeon 4350 on one of my other machines and I was planning on adding that to this new build. I'm not looking to span video games on all three monitors and I'm not planning on using Crossfire (which is obviously impossible with two completely different video cards) but my question is: will I run into any problems running two separate video cards on the PCI-e slots? I'm concerned about two different models of video cards running on the same bus. I'll be dual booting between Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04 and am a bit concerned about the configuration of two video cards particularly under Ubuntu.

The documentation that I've found on dual video cards seems to focus on video cards running in Crossfire, which I'm not interested in. I'm just interested in having three monitors for productivity type stuff (mostly online research, documents, and having a ton of space with which to organize all of the useful crap that I have on my desktop), I'll be using just one monitor for the occasional video game.

Thanks for your help.
 
In Windows 7 it should not be a problem.
In Ubuntu there could be issues. Multi-GPU configurations generally don't run well on Linux and you might lose hardware acceleration if you want all 3 monitors active.
 
yes it will work perfectly fine in xp/vista/7.. windows 7 also supports the ability to run 2 different brand cards ati/nvidia in the same system as well..

as far as ubuntu goes i'm not totally sure but the fact that they are both ATI cards using the ATI drivers it should work fine or at least it should work fine in theory but then again its linux so who knows..
 
Well that's a relief. I was a bit worried that I had made a stupid mistake by getting a motherboard that doesn't have onboard video.

Thanks for your input. I suppose that I'll try Ubuntu but I'm not enough of a die-hard Linux user to not let a triple monitor setup get in my way.
 
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