Dual Monitors - Question

[LWA]

Hey all,
Right I have a Shuttle ST20 and a Radeon X850 graphics card. Currently I have my 22" monitor and my 17" monitor plugged into the graphics card (in the DVI and VGA ports on the graphics card respectively) .

However I came to thinking would I see any benefit on using the on board graphics to display my secondary monitor whilst keeping my main monitor plugged into the graphics card?

Any suggestions/clarifications would be gratefully received.

Thanks,
Leon

[vinnyT]

I don't think onboard gfx and discrete cards work well together at the same time. This is why, when upgrading from onboard to discrete, the advise is to disable the onboard in the bios. But I really don't think you would get any benefit doing this, even if you could get it to work.


You could try it, the worse that could happen is that your pc boots (or not) and you have no display, so you restore to how it was before.

It's possible to use 2 discrete cards to use upto 4 monitors, with pci-e/agp and an old pci card.


Hope this helps.

[Templar87]

I have a ST20 also, using the onboard and pci-e (in my case a x1950pro) lets u use up to 4 monitors (as you prolly know :-)).
The thing i noticed when using the onboard feeding to my 2nd monitor was that the resolution (of just the one monitor) was limited to that of the onboard card - for the ST20 i think it's 1280x1024.
Moving both to the pci-e card allowed me to up the res to 1600x1200 on both. Also, if u try to play a game on the monitor on the onboard, it runs a lot slower - maybe it's only using the onboard card to power it, i don't know.

[MadduckUK]

However I came to thinking would I see any benefit on using the on board graphics to display my secondary monitor whilst keeping my main monitor plugged into the graphics card?

no, if your only using 2 monitors the onboard vid should be disabled in the bios and forgotte about.

[Templar87]

nm, misread :-)

[LWA]

no, if your only using 2 monitors the onboard vid should be disabled in the bios and forgotte about.

Ty mate, that's exactly the advice I was after.