GFX Strings - DUAL CARDS - How To

[steenamaroo]

hi aquamac.

first off, i would like to thank you for all the work that you put in!!

without people like you i would have had no success with my setups!



i was wandering if you could help me with what should be a simple enough problem..


i have 10.5.6 running dual 7600gs 512mb gfx cards <one silent vga/dvi and one fanned dvi/dvi> on a giga p35ds4 board.

i use efi strings and have qe and ci,<using the 3 dvi outputs>

The two dvi fanned card outputs are great,,,,

but,,,the output from the silent card is appearing to be low in performance.

if i run tests from open gl extensions viewer, my fps is great on the dual dvis, but drops to about 10% if i drag to the 3rd screen....

also, output 3 doesn't appear in the list of devices for testing.


i have swapped card positions, and even tried with two 7600gs silents, and it's always the secondary slot's card which shows reduced performance......



can you think of anything that might help???


thanks in advance!!

[bickyb]

Hi,
I have two Nvidia Video Cards on my motherboard. One is a PCI express, one is a PCI card. I did this because my motherboard didn't have two PCI express slots.
I am able to run both of these video cards (the PCI express is a 7200 and the PCI is a 6200, both with 256 mb of ram) on Windows and have a quad monitor setup. I am trying to do the same thing on my hackintosh. Does anyone know if this is possible. All of the posts I have seen to date are for people that have two PCI express cards.
The good news is that both of these cards run fine individually.
Any thoughts on how I can get this working? I am running Kalway 10.5.2

[steenamaroo]

lmao!! sounds very very familiar
forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=104266&pid=1052356&mode=threaded&start=100#entry1052356



i don't know much about it, but i am not aware of any <large amount of> success with pci graphics on osx....

that aside, i can't image pci would play nice with pcie,,,but maybe someone will correct me..




edit: if anyone's reading, i got my problem solved...or rather,,,realised it wasn't actually broken,,lol

[aquamac]

Steenamaroo,

Just saw your post, (I HAVE BEEN AWAY FOR A WHILE). I cannot think of any particular reasons why your second card is slower other that that your second slot could be 4x or an 8x slot whereas your first PCIe slot is most likely a 16x slot. Do all 4 outputs work on your cards, I would have thought you would need to change the the NVCAP info on the VGA/DVI card.

Bickyb,

I have not tried this with PCI cards as I don't have any, although I would not hold out a lot of hope.

[steenamaroo]

hi,,and thanks for the reply..


strangely enough, i didn't have to edit nvcap values <somehow>

although it turns out i was being stupid...

old opengl viewer used to list all the displays in one list for testing....i think,,


it seems now you have to select your card in the menu bar,,,and when i do that, my fps is only marginally lower on the second card,,which seems normal enough,,


thank you for your reply though,,,

while i'm here,,have you ever heard of a success with two ati cards on efistrings, specifially 2600 93c4 cards?

i have them both booting wiht qe and ci on one, but "no displays connected" on the other.


thanks again.

[aquamac]

Actually, I have not heard of anyone getting 2 ATI cards going but that does not mean it is impossible. Are you saying you have them fully working or that only one is working?

[steenamaroo]

i can get both working,,separately,on the same string,,


but with both installed,,,,one shows qe and ci no sweat,,but the other shows that no display is connected,,and gives no output.


people say twin ati cards is impossible on efistrings,,but let's face it,,

that's what makes it fun???!!!

[aquamac]

Did you try connecting your monitor to the second card and setting your bios to boot from PEG 2. This can help with nvidia cards.

[steenamaroo]

unfortunately i did,

i'm using my main computer as a test setup, and it usually houses the twin 7600gs cards,,

idk,,maybe it just can't be done, but if the two nvidias work together,,,,,and the two atis work separately <on the dual string> ,,then,,i'm tempted to keep tryin!

thanks for the reply again.

[jaev]

My second 9800GTX+ came in today aqua, i'll be giving this a shot soon will post if i have any questions

[aquamac]

Hey good luck with that Jaev. What motherboard do you have?

[jaev]

Jan 26, 2009 20:18:00 GMT aquamac said:

Hey good luck with that Jaev. What motherboard do you have?

lol i was shooting for the moon i guess.

I have an evga x58 mobo. Its that new tri-sli one. With i7 920. It didnt like both of the cards together. There's also no options in the bios to enable booting off of peg2. So strange however you know since the cards work perfectly fine by themselves.

[fatnerd]

Hello Everyone,

I think I've almost got this working using two 9600GT 512MB on an Gigabyte EP45-DS3R. Both cards work fine for themselves. If I set my BIOS to PEG, the card in the first slot will boot up and both displays on that card work fine with QE/CI. The second card however remains dead. If I switch to PEG2 I get the exact same results only now it's the second card doing all the fancy stuff and the first one being dead.

Both cards are recognized by System Profiler. The second card does not just show as "display", but with all the correct information, except that the displays attached to it don't get recognized.

I'm running iPC 10.5.6 with Voodoo Kernel and Chameleon. Could there be something wrong with this? Or do you have any other ideas what I might be doing wrong? I'm desperate...

[aquamac]

Can you post a grab of your system profiler. Did you try hot-plugging the displays after you are booted up?

[fatnerd]

Hey aquamac,

thanks for your interest. I've just got it working using Your EFI-String-Template and some of the kexts from this post: forum.insanelymac.com/lofiversion/index.php/t131914.html

So far everything seems fine, with QE/CI on all screens and even GPU-Fan-Throttling.

Thanks a lot