A friend of mine sold me 2 older 19″ flat panels for just $50, but I needed a second videocard to drive the extra displays. Although I absolutely detest shopping there and I avoid it at all costs, I picked up a GeForce 9800 GT from Best Buy. Don’t worry, it was on sale so I was getting screwed slightly less than usual.

Interestingly enough, the 9800 is practically identical to the 8800. The two biggest differences are the move to the smaller manufacturing process (55nm from 65nm) and an updated BIOS on the card. This particular model is made by PNY and is tagged with an “EE” at the end to denote that it’s an “Energy Efficient” edition. Basically it means that it doesn’t require the standard 6-pin PCI-E graphics card power connection from your PSU. It draws all of it’s power (only 66 watts under full load!) from the PCI-E bus. Thankfully my 550 watt power supply is beefy enough to drive both cards without breaking a sweat.

Installation was simple enough. Getting Windows XP to recognize the second card was another story, though.

See, what you’re supposed to be able to do is just drop the card into the second slot and when you reboot, Windows will happily say “Wow, cool, nice new videocard! Lemme install those drivers for ya so you can get started experiencing multi-monitor bliss!” In fact, my copy of Windows just said “New videocard? Huh? Nobody tells me nutin’.”

And thus the issue debugging begins. I really hate this part.

First up was checking that the card was seated correctly. In the process of reseating the card, I noticed a small daughter card between my videocard slots that allowed you to specify if you were using single or dual videocards. “Sweet,” I thought, “this is the problem right here. I swapped the daughter card around to “dual videocards”  and booted up the rig.

No dice.

Next I thought perhaps the nVidia drivers only detected new cards when they were installed. I wiped off the current nVidia drivers and downloaded the latest copy. After reinstalling the video drivers, Windows still had no idea the second videocard was even there.

As I was double checking my motherboard manual to make sure dual videocards without SLI was indeed supported, I noticed that when one card is installed it runs at 16x speed. When two cards are installed, however, it splits the PCI-E bus and runs both cards in x8. “Perfect,” I thought, “I’ll just check the bus speed to see if the motherboard even sees the card.”

After locating the window in the nVidia control panel that shows you the PCI-E bus stats, I verfied that indeed, my single card (the 8800 GT) was running in x8. The motherboard was detecting the second card.

By this point, you’re probably wondering why I was using the 9800 GT (the newer card) as my secondary graphics card and the older 8800 GT as the primary card.

The only negative comment I found when looking through reviews of the PNY 9800 GT EE was that for some reason the fan seemed locked to 45% speed. Normally the fan spins up as necessary to cool off  the card under higher load, but this card didn’t seem to do that. You can adjust the fan speed manually through the nTune software, but I didn’t particularly feel like adjusting this every time I played a game, or have my computer sound like a Harrier jet 24/7. (It already sounds like a idling tractor.) Since the cards are practically identical performance-wise, I figured I’d leave the 8800 pulling gaming duty while the 9800 only had to push out the pixels to the 2 new monitors.

Since the 9800 wasn’t being detected by Windows, I then figured that maybe I’d try swapping the cards. After installing the 9800 in the primary slot and the 8800 in the secondary slot, I was greeted to a driver installation of my 9800, but my 8800 was nowhere to be found. At this point, I was seriously worried that somehow my motherboard’s second PCI-E slot was unusable.

I gave it one last hurrah and swapped the cards back. As soon as I booted up, I was greeted by nVidia’s multi-monitor setup wizard and Windows dutifully installing the 9800 drivers again. All four monitors were working.

Moral of the story: If your secondary card isn’t getting detected, install it in the primary slot and give Windows a chance to see it and install the drivers. Then swap it back to the secondary slot.

Lastly, this post couldn’t possibly be complete without pictures!

Four monitors means I can get my LCD tan 4x quicker!

Playing Team Fortress 2 across three screens is only one of many uses!

If you’re feeling particularly brave, check out these screenshots to see what I’m seeing when I play Team Fortress 2. Thanks to the SoftTH utility, I can get triple head gaming without the Matrox hardware adapter!

plr_pipeline as Pyro with SoftTH

plr_pipeline as Soldier with SoftTH