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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TraderAlan who wrote (1958)	8/15/1998 3:14:00 PM
From: Dirk Hente	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14778

TraderAlan, here are my thoughts and experiences: 1. Millennium Cards I never had any problems using my Millennium cards with Win98 and Win Nt4.0 in a dual monitor configuration. 2. Your AGP ATI accelerator If you have certified drivers for your ATI accelerator and additional pci cards you shouldn't have any probs using them all in a multi mon configuration under Win98. There are no restrictions on size, position, resolution or refresh rates. Whether or not your AGB ATI accelerator is detected as your 'primary adapter' depends only on your bios. If your bios has no 'switch' for something like 'AGP is the primary' then your pci graphic accelerator will become the primary. You will not loose anything wrt performance if your AGP is the 'secondary card'. The word 'primary card' is only a descriptor. A better word might be 'compatibility card' . The essential point here is, that in a multi monitor setup your primary card plays a special role since the monitor connected to this card is guaranteed to contain traditional screen coordinates. Almost all 'multimonitor-challenged' apps will run correctly on this monitor. Additionally, all apps that are DOS apps will run only on this monitor (in DOS mode or DOS full screen mode). The 'secondary' cards or monitors are all the rest which are not the primaries but are included in the Windows desktop area. WRT performance you are not loosing anything whether a certain card is a primary or secondary. The performance 'sticks' with the card and not with the role the card 'plays' on your enlarged desktop area ( which is also known as 'virtual desktop'). The decision whether a card is a primary or secondary is of no importance as long as you dont have DOS apps. Since the DOS apps can run only on the primary monitor the corresponding grafic card should be the faster one. For a Win 98 app you can always move your app to that monitor which is attached to the fastest card in your system and then you will get the fastest performance. However if your application window spans across multiple screens the performance may be different if you have combined a slow and a fast grafic card in your system. 3.IRQ As long as you stick with PCI you'll have no IRQ probs. 4. Turning off monitors by software You can turn off your secondary monitors by software using the 'properties' menu of the desktop. You can identify each secondary monitor by its number on the 'settings panel' and disable it. However, you cannot disable the primary monitor. BTW, disabling secondary monitors doesn't affect the system performance, i.e. your system is not getting faster only because you switch off the monitors. On the other hand, your system is not going slower only because you add more grafic accelerator cards. What slows down the computer is the fact that you usually have more applications running on a multi mon setup.