dual graphics card issue

[Factorxfiles]

Ok, here's my situation. I just purchased an xfx 5770 as an upgrade to replace my old x800gt. I also have an ancient HIS 9250 pci card for a couple extra monitors (mobo only has one pci-e x16 slot). Win xp pro is the OS.

Now, the x800 and 9250 played just fine together. I had to install the drivers in order (9250, reboot, x800, reboot), and set pci to initialize first in bios. WIth it set up like that, everything worked fine, even though they used different ati/amd driver packages (legacy and even older legacy).

The new 5770 gives me no such luck.

I believe the problem is that they both copy files of the same names to system32/drivers, and whichever is installed second will overwrite the first, causing chaos.

I have tried everything that i can think of. The best I managed to do was (not sure how), glitch it to where I had both monitors on the 5770 working, and one from the 9250 (though in dev manager it was "disabled") working, even though in display properties it did not show it at all.

Is there some strange voodoo that must be done to get the current drivers to work with the 6.11 (pre-r300) drivers side by side? I don't even care if I get 2d acceleration out of the 9250, I only use those 2 for general apps, no gaming or even video except on occasion.

 

[GotNoRice]

I had a strange issue for a while that wouldn't allow me to overclock my videocards if I had multiple monitors enabled so I bought a PCI X1300 from ebay to drive a 2nd and 3rd monitor while just having my 4870x2's drive the first monitor.

Since the X1300 is only supported by the legacy driver at this point (10.2 being the newest) I couldn't install the same driver for all cards unless it was the legacy driver, and since with Crossfire you generally always want the newest driver that was not a great solution.

My best results were when I installed my primary videocards and got that all setup, then I would put the X1300 in and allow windows 7 to detect and install drivers for that automatically, whatever drivers it had for it. In that way it seemed to allow me to continue using the newest catalyst drivers on my main card but I always suspected that it was still overwriting certain files so I eventually removed the x1300. That may still be your best bet however as it worked reasonably well.

I think the only complete hassle-free way would be to get a 3xxx or 4xxx PCI or PCIe 1x card to do the job as that would be using the same driver as your 5xxx card.

 

[Factorxfiles]

thanks GNR. I tried installing the 5770 first, then once it was all good to go, inserting the 9250 and letting windows do it's thing, but it couldn't find a suitable driver on it's own. So, no luck. I guess I'm just down to 2 monitors till I get around to a full new rig and another 5770.