Using two different ATI video cards on the same PC - Is it possible ?

[MarioMan]

Hi,

Is it possible to use two different ATI video cards on the same PC, under Windows 7 ?

I don't mean Crossfire, but using them as two independent video cards.

What I have in mind is to get an ATI FirePro 2460 card, which will run 3 or 4 displays using Eyefinity, and at the same time have my Radeon HD 4850 video card on my second PCI-E x16 slot, driving my other monitor by itself only.

Will it work ?

I emailed ATI's technical support and they said that they didn't test it, and they don't recommend it because these are two different cards and drivers and it can cause problems.

This leads me to the other issue - if I'll install the moded FirePro drivers then the driver will treat the 4850 as a FirePro card so I won't have to install the Radeon drivers.


What do you think ?

 

[GotNoRice]

The best results would be with two cards that use the same drivers. I'm assuming that the FirePro drivers use a different driver set from the standard catalyst drivers. It generally won't let you, for example, have two different versions of Catalyst Control Center installed.

When using mismatched cards like that I've found the best results to be when you install the ATI drivers for whatever is going to be your main card, and for the 2nd card just let it use whatever drivers it finds from windows update and installs automatically - since that won't include a control panel, etc in most cases. This is how I got a PCI X1300 to work along with my 4870x2's for a while even though the X1300 is only supported via the legacy driver.

 

[MarioMan]

So if I go with the FirePro 2460 as the main card and the Radeon HD 4850 - soft-moded to its FirePro match will I have full driver functionality for both of them ?

 

[GotNoRice]

Assuming that both of those FirePro models use the same unified driver then yes.