Video Cards

[Robert Dewey]

I guess I will put this here, since it has to do with my meteorology workstation (and is chase-related)...

Let's say I have two video cards:

Video Card 1: PCI-Express, 128MB DDR RAM, 128-Bit
Video Card 2: PCI, 4MB RAM, 64-Bit

What if I run these cards in Linux (Fedora, specifically) and use a dual-head setup - will the monitor connected to the "Video Card 1" be able to display graphics intensive applications, while the monitor connected to "Video Card 2" won't? Will they "share" resources? Or will both be limited to the weakest card?

I honestly never thought about this before - I usually only ran identical cards in a dual-head setup (or at least cards with the same bit-rate and RAM size).

 

[GPhillips]

Originally posted by rdewey
Video Card 1: PCI-Express, 128MB DDR RAM, 128-Bit
Video Card 2: PCI, 4MB RAM, 64-Bit

What if I run these cards in Linux (Fedora, specifically) and use a dual-head setup - will the monitor connected to the \"Video Card 1\" be able to display graphics intensive applications, while the monitor connected to \"Video Card 2\" won't?

That would be the correct answer. The slowness of the PCI card should not affect the faster card. That's the way it works in Windows, and should work the same way in Linux.

 

[John Erwin]

Originally posted by rdewey
I honestly never thought about this before - I usually only ran identical cards in a dual-head setup (or at least cards with the same oxebit-rate and RAM size).

Having not done this in Linux yet I can only be of limited help here, however I've done this on quite a few Windows boxes.

Each card will dictate the quality of what can be shown on the attached monitor.

The more interesting question will be how Linux handles the cards; if you're running a graphical environment like Gnome or KDE I suspect you'll have the option of "stretching" the desktop or running a separate desktop on the other monitor. Hopefully this will just be a matter of "dropping" the applicable app on the monitor you want it on.

In any case, please post your observations and/or experiences with this setup here; I'm sure I'm not the only one that will be interested in your results. Sooner or later I'll likely try doing the same.

Cheers!

 

[Robert Dewey]

Well, unfortunately I think my experiment ended early...

I was attempting to configure an old sound card on my Linux machine, and upon loading the drivers - my machine crashed HARD. In fact, it corrupted the kernel, and I think it burned out the PCI slots (putting any device into any PCI slot will cause a system boot error) :shock:

I tried loading different PCI cards into the PCI slots (cards that are known to work such as sound and VGA cards), but nothing shows up. I thought maybe it was the corrupt kernel causing this, so I did a fresh format and re-install - but the PCI slots still don't work.

I'm going to play around a bit more, and try and ethernet card and see if that fires up. If it does, then at least I know my PCI slots are still in working order, and that for some reason the sound and VGA cards (that are in working order) are causing some sort of problem specific to only this machine (fat chance, eh?). If not, at least nothing else on my system was damaged (i.e. PCI-E, RAID controllers, etc.).

 

[Robert Dewey]

Well, I am now pretty sure that the PCI slots are indeed dead :x

So, I gave in and went out and bought a DVI-I to VGA adapter, and am using dual-head on my single Radeon X600 card. Even though the setup works, I was really looking forward to testing out how two seperate and very different video cards would act in Linux...

Oh well :cry: