Adding a second monitor

[Liam Proven]

On 24 June 2012 16:33, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:
> Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>> So, given that I have a large PCI-E slot and a regular PCI-X slot
>> empty, I'm wondering...
>> 1) Should I expect X to manage 2 cards, and if so what should I do
>> besides just plugging them in?
>
> In general, X is happy with two monitors on one card, and anything else
> is still considered esoteric. There are a few multi-card setups that
> are known to work, and several that don't.
>
> In general, you will need to co-operative cards and a non-free
> driver that works with both. I'm pretty sure that this works in NVidia
> with the right cards, their driver and their Twinview tool, but it does
> leave your setup's reliance very much in the hands of NVidia

Sounds more or less right.

In my experience, by rule of thumb rather than hard-and-fast absolutes:

* a pair of 2 identical single-port cards is fairly likely to work

* if cards need proprietary drivers, make sure both need the *same*
driver - e.g. 2 nVidias of the same generation, or 2 ATIs of the same
generation

* a pair of 2 cards where the drivers are FOSS, good, modern & support
multihead has a fair chance

* don't mix & match cards where one requires a proprietary drive & the
other doesn't

* don't mix & match cards that need proprietary drivers - e.g. 1 × ATI
+ 1 × nVidia

* don't mix generations - e.g. random old weird thing + modern card is
not a good choice.

* if you have motherboard graphics + an AGP slot, you can't combine
them; only 1 AGP device at a time is possible. AGP+PCI works, though

-- 
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