8 Series, three monitors, Vista 64.

It feels like the creation of the Perfect Storm of PC problems: Vista 64, Nvidia drivers, and a mix of cards. All I need is some dramatic music as I BSOD, and the nightmare would be complete.

Short story:

My current setup consists of a 975X MSI board, e6600, 4GB of RAM, and two video cards: An 8800GTS, and a 8500GT.

I want to run 3 monitors, and the 3 monitors are:

Main: Dell 3007, 2560x1600
Secondary (attached to 8800GTS): Viewsonic 22", 1600x1200
Tertiary (attached to 8500GT): Viewsonic 22", 1600x1200.

The good news? Each card runs fine when the other card is disabled/not in the system. Hell, the 8500GT can run the Dell monitor, and it's quite amusing to do so.

However, as soon as I attempt to start the machine with both cards in/enabled, disaster strikes.

Generally, the system gets to right before I press "ctrl-alt-delete" (domain ftw) to login, and the screen just stays black. The Dell monitor stays powered, as in, it doesn't "go to sleep", but just remains black.

After a few minutes (literally, minutes: I can take a shower and come back, and it's still doing it) it BSODs. No driver mentioned in the BSOD, but 0x000000124 is in the BSOD. Googling this brings up... well, not much of use.

I've tried every driver I know: The Nvidia released ones, the Betas, all of them with the same problem.

The odd thing is, though, I've gone through a few generations of Nvidia cards, and the 8 series together work the "worst", I guess you'd call it. I had a 6200 in the system before, and while the drivers loaded fine, it BSODs/crashed hard core whenever I went in to enable the monitor in Display Properties->Settings. That is, the system saw the video card, saw that it had 2 monitor connections, but just crashed when I tried to enable it.

The same problem with the 6200 happened when I tried a 7600GS. Drivers installed fine, just crashed when trying to enable.

Then I went to Circuit City (god...) and bought the 8500GT, since I wanted to try it. Ironically enough, it rang up wrong, and I'll be getting it for ~90 bucks. Still too much for a piss poor card like this, but hey, it's a third-monitor card. But I digress.

So, any ideas, suggestions, mockeries? I'm trying to do everything right here: I went out and bought a "LOL OMG NEXT GEN!" video card to run with my "LOL OMG NEXT GEN" video card that is actually good, and I'm not trying to jury rig a GeForce4 to run with my 8800. This shouldn't be this hard. It simply shouldn't be. I feel like I'm missing something.

Please help me Obi-Wan, you're my only hope. Or something.

And for the record, I did "report a bug" with Nvidia, which I'm sure will be as useful as pissing into a wind, and trying to stay dry. Link was here, for the report bug: http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance.html

To keep in with the Star Wars theme.

Good luck...you're gonna need it.

are you running a bluetooth keyboard and/or mouse? also, I would recommend the latest BETA drivers (under BETA drivers...heh, go figure) on the Nvidia Driver download page.

On the search for the BSOD error code, I saw the bluetooth thing mentioned, which might be where you got that question, too.

However, no, I'm not running a bluetooth mouse or keyboard. I'm running an old, PS/2 style keyboard since I love it, and an MX1000. And if I need to buy a new fracking (lol Battlestar reference, I win @ life) mouse or keyboard to get my video cards to work, I'll be quite sad. And I have tried the newest Betas, I have yet to try the 165s, since Nvidia had people pull them since there was an issue, I guess, but I might try to get my hands on them.

I have a feeling, deep in the pit of my stomach, that this is just the Nvidia Vista drivers at work. I had read so many horrible things about them, but I passed them off, thinking "oh, people must just be too stupid to get their PCs to work", and now I'm eating those thoughts.

I guess a better question is this: Is anyone running Vista (64 or 32) and 3 monitors, with a mix of cards like this? I've always been in an odd, never-represented minority: I use a lot of monitors. And people don't do that.

I was wondering if you had resolved this issue or if anyone else has the same problems? I'll be running a near exact setup as you (Vista 64bit, one main LCD, two flanking LCD's, 8-series driving main LCD) and had planned to get another 8-series card (to drive the flanking LCD's) thinking it'd be "more compatible" than a 6 or 7 series. silent-circuit recommended in this post that laptop video card drivers could be used to get a 6/7 series to work properly. The link he referenced is: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/

All of my system components are currently ordered except my second video card which will be used to drive two flanking LCD's just like yourself. Can anyone else who has a similar setup post their results, be it good or bad? Thanks!

another way to go is a triplehead2go module.... all youll need is one video out and it ups the max width resolution to 3850x1024(i think)... So if you run 3 monitors you end up with 1280x1024. I know alot of gamers that use this setup and really like it.. ill include a link so you can see what im talking about... LOL i have been thinking about getting one so i just happen to have the link riggghhhtt here. Im waiting for them to come out with the digital version which should be shipping as of today or tomorrrow..

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/products/th2go/


ps-- admins if that link is not cool just remove it.. Im only trying to help out-- i have nothing to do with matrox...

TH2GO unfortunately caps the vertical resolution by 1024, making it useless when running multiple different sized monitors that have vertical resolutions greater than 1024.

If anyone is running the following combo of hardware/software and has gotten it to work flawlessly (or not), could you please reveal what you did to make it happen (specific drivers, Vista tweaks, etc.)?

1x Main LCD driven by 8 Series
2x Extra LCD's driven by _ Series
Vista 64-bit