Dual head - internal Intel 815, several PCI cards

[Alex Deucher]

On 10/15/05, Jim Cornette <jim-cornette at insight.rr.com> wrote:
> I have tried to configure Dual head using several different PCI video
> card in conjunction with the internal Intel 815 without any luck. The
> first attempt was with a Radeon 7000 video card that was broken during
> the time that I attempted to use it. I resorted to using the vesa drive
> for the radeon but ended up having trouble with the Intel seeming to
> overlap areas where the radeon using the vesa card crossed memory
> allocations. I could partly get the radeon card working but only if I
> used the vesa driver for the primary Intel builtin video.
> Using the vesa for the Intel 815 did not work with getting the
> monitor/display from displaying anything else but diagonal lines while
> the secondary radeon worked if the mouse was moved into where the
> display unblanked.
> Going through several other cards, an ATI  (PCI) and a Nividia (AGP)
> resulted in no dual head, but was able to use whichever card was set to
> primary through BIOS. The problem that I encountered was that the Intel
> would only allow reduced settings like 800x600 and the secondary card
> was always blank.
>
> To clarify how my motherboard 370SSM works, with AGP, it does not allow
> the builtin Intel to be usable at all. With a PCI, two video cards are
> functional if the PCI is primary in MS ME. The cards always seem to not
> use the PCI video memory on the cards, but tap into where the Builtin
> Intel uses memory which reduce the maximum resolution obtainable if you
> tried to use the tool for configuring xorg in Fedora called
> system-config-display. If I edited the xorg.conf file to include
> 1280x1024, the Intel works great.
>
> Anyway, I obtained another MGA PCI video card, G200 and am interested in
> giving this combination a try. I have the card installed with the Intel
> as primary where the resolution is reduced to 800x600 and the Matrox is
> detected but not engaged if dual head is activated. I really would like
> to know how to get the PCI cards to utilize their on board memory
> instead of stealing from the memory pool that the Internal card needs to
> work properly.
>
> Is this feat possible? Any direction (except "get lost") appreciated.
>

The add in cards will never use the integrated intel card's memory. 
The integrated intel chips are AGP so you can only use them in
conjunction with PCI cards.  It seems your system has problems posting
secondary cards.  Can you post your X configs and logs somewhere?

Alex

> Jim
>
> --
> QOTD:
>         If it's too loud, you're too old.
>