Can you put 2 video cards in a pc for dual monitor etc?

ok, my mother board comes with a vga out, but it shuts off when i put an agp video card in. why can't i use both? if I had a pci video card instead could I get dual monitor with my motherboard's output? or will I need to have both my agp card and pci card in for dual monitor? It seems foolish that since my motherboard has a video (processer?) output, and i also have a video card with an output, that I can't use both of these with 2 monitors. can't I change the fact that that port shuts off when an agp card is inserted?

Can you put 2 video cards in a pc for dual monitor etc?
I'm not sure because I don't exactly know what you mean by dual monitor...


if you want to have like a monitor and a big screen showing what your monitor is showing then you can get a dongle, or a new video card. most newer ones support more than a single output.


But, If you want to have your moniter to work on and a tv to watch a movie on off your pc than you're gonna either need to buy an expensive video card to replace yours, or buy a pci video card for cheap and take out your AGP video card. having just a pci video card in shoudn't shut down your integrated one on your Mobo (i like that).


But as someone already stated, this could eat up more of your cpu. well i shouldn't say "could", it will.
Reply:well, some video cards come with two sets of outputs, so you could run two from one card, ATi has the crossfire system that uses two video cards together for better graphics performance where you could use two monitors. My ATi Radeon 200 built-in GPU chip supports two monitors, but has one VGA, the other is a composite output. It works. See if you have that.





I 'think' the reason why the VGA from the comp GPU shuts down is because the comp is sensing the AGP card and shutting down the internal GPU system since it is rather inefficient, and some are really using the CPU power.
Reply:definitely not, but u can use videocards with dual outputs, which have 2 VGA or 1 VGA %26amp; 1 Composite outputs...
Reply:Most new agp cards are dual head and have software that allow you to use both, Radeon are good, but you may need an adaptor for one of the sockets
Reply:That depends. What type of computer is it? More specifically what kind of motherboard is it? Depending on the card, you can run a dual moniter setup with only one video card but without knowing what kind of processing power you've got and what kind of motherboard you have there is no way to know if your sytem is capable of running a dual montier setup. Also, I'm sure you know this but make sure you're plugging the moniter into the video card directly as opposed to the integrated vid off the mobo. One last thing, if you want to run dual moniters off of one card you will need to get a dongle. It's like a Y where the bottom goes into your video card and the top part that splits go into your two moniter cables.
Reply:The motherboard would be unable to determine which video adapter to send video signals if there are 2 active video adapters.





When the motherboard senses a video card in the AGP slot, it automatically disables the built-in video adapter since the video card in the AGP slot would most probably be the better and more capable video adapter.





Having 2 active video adapter would also place a heavy processing load on the motherboard as the video signals may be unbalanced due to the video adapters' different capabilities. Although video processing is handled by chip on video adapters, the motherboard still has to transfer signals to and from different components.





For dual monitor display, a video card that can output to 2 monitors is required.
Reply:Sounds like your powersupply doesn't have enough oomph to run the card and the rest of the computer, check the instruction manual and documentation that came with the card. My ATI needed about 350 and it was an AGP card. Make sure your powersupply runs about 450 or more watts. Do you have an AGP card with a port for an LCD monitor? You can by a part that'll make it an analog for use with a CRT monitor, then you can have dual monitors that way :)

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