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Trouble using multiple video cards

Hello,

I am having trouble setting up my PC’s for multiple monitors.
They are AMD athalon with 1 Gig Ram and XP PRO

I am trying to run 5 monitors using three video cards.
1 is AGP and 2 are PCI, all of them are Nvidia Geforce 5200.
(I tried mixing in a Geforce MX400, but this was even worse.)

What happens is the PC’s become incredibly slow, for example, opening the display properties window can take 1 minute or more, any changes can also take minutes. With about four programs open, if you take the display properties window and drag it about,
It leaves ghosting trails on the displays used for charting programs such as Esignal and Tradestation.

On one of the PC’s, even after removing the extra cards and using just one card, the same sluggishness occurs, this despite the fact that that PC had no problems in the past with two cards and three monitors.

Opening task manager and performance, there is always plenty of memory left over, though on one boot the CPU performance remained at 100% until rebooted.

The monitors are 3 Samsung 17” and one 20” wide, all set to 1280 x 1024, 1 20” Samsung 1280 X 1024 and 1 Olevia 43” at 1366 x 768. All the Samsung’s and the Nvidia cards have the latest drives. The Olevia doesn’t offer drivers on it’s website and is listed as a default analog monitor.

My next step it to try using three PCI cards and eliminate the AGP. But in the past I have used 1 AGP and 1 PCI for 4 monitors with no problems, it is adding the third card (PCI) that started the trouble.

Thank you for any assistance.
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onedeej

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bagua1

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Hello Onedeej:

I checked the Bios and I do not see a selection for Bus mastering

The variables are as below, with brackets around the one chosen:

Resources controlled by      [auto (escd)]
                                  Manual

FSB Spectrum                  [0,50%]
                                    1.00%
                                    Disabled

AGP spread spectrum            [0.50%]
                                       Disabled

Graphics apature size            32      
                                          64      
                                      [128]      
                                      256      
                                       512

AGP frequency      [auto]
                        50 mhz
                        66
                        67
                        68      
                        69      
                        70      
                        71

Have you thought about using an external video splitter? This won't help if you want different views on all five monitors, but if you are trying to duplicate the same output on all five, I would look at a splitter.
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Thank you nelson but all the displays must have different views.
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Problem was resolved by using matching PCI cards and eliminating the AGP one, though that was otherwise matching