Dual head - internal Intel 815, several PCI cards

Jim Cornette jim-cornette at insight.rr.com
Sat Oct 15 20:13:19 PDT 2005


I have tried to configure Dual head using several different PCI video 
card in conjunction with the internal Intel 815 without any luck. The 
first attempt was with a Radeon 7000 video card that was broken during 
the time that I attempted to use it. I resorted to using the vesa drive 
for the radeon but ended up having trouble with the Intel seeming to 
overlap areas where the radeon using the vesa card crossed memory 
allocations. I could partly get the radeon card working but only if I 
used the vesa driver for the primary Intel builtin video.
Using the vesa for the Intel 815 did not work with getting the 
monitor/display from displaying anything else but diagonal lines while 
the secondary radeon worked if the mouse was moved into where the 
display unblanked.
Going through several other cards, an ATI  (PCI) and a Nividia (AGP) 
resulted in no dual head, but was able to use whichever card was set to 
primary through BIOS. The problem that I encountered was that the Intel 
would only allow reduced settings like 800x600 and the secondary card 
was always blank.

To clarify how my motherboard 370SSM works, with AGP, it does not allow 
the builtin Intel to be usable at all. With a PCI, two video cards are 
functional if the PCI is primary in MS ME. The cards always seem to not 
use the PCI video memory on the cards, but tap into where the Builtin 
Intel uses memory which reduce the maximum resolution obtainable if you 
tried to use the tool for configuring xorg in Fedora called 
system-config-display. If I edited the xorg.conf file to include 
1280x1024, the Intel works great.

Anyway, I obtained another MGA PCI video card, G200 and am interested in 
giving this combination a try. I have the card installed with the Intel 
as primary where the resolution is reduced to 800x600 and the Matrox is 
detected but not engaged if dual head is activated. I really would like 
to know how to get the PCI cards to utilize their on board memory 
instead of stealing from the memory pool that the Internal card needs to 
work properly.

Is this feat possible? Any direction (except "get lost") appreciated.

Jim

-- 
QOTD:
	If it's too loud, you're too old.




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