Trying to setup 5 monitors

[cspannos]

Hi everyone,

I am desperately trying to get both of these cards installed on my system in order to get 5 monitors working. The specs for everything are below:

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Motherboard: Asus P5WDG2-WS
Primary Video Card: BFG nVidia GeForce GTX 295 1792MB PCIe 2.0 ( B )
Primary Display: 1 x Dell 3008WPF (Digital) @ 2560x1600
Secondary Video Card: Jaton VIDEO-558PCI-Quad GeForce 8400GS
Secondary Displays: 4 x Dell SP2309W (Digital) @ 2048x1152
Power Supply: 1000W

I've had the GTX295 working perfectly on its own for quite a while now. I just bought the 8400GS since it supports 4 DVI outputs and it's a PCI card. That's the only slot left on my motherboard since the GTX295 takes up so much room aside from the PCI-X slots on there.

When I install the 8400GS and I try to boot into windows, the system just hangs on the Starting Windows screen. Nothing else happens. I messed around with settings in the BIOS to see if it was some kind of resource confilct, but nothing helped. You can take a look at most of the settings as they are now here or in the attachments:


Is there something that I am missing? Is my PSU powerful enough? I really don't know what to try next.... any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kosta

 

[edijs]

This is an interesting post related to this topic.

My guess is that there's a problem with the drivers. Windows is not sure what's going on and hangs. Maybe you can try to do this via Safe Mode - I mean install the driver for the 8400?

 

[cspannos]

Thanks for the link edijs. As I read through it, one person suggests that you have to have compatible cards that can run using the same driver. I thought about that, that's why I bought the 8400GS. It uses the same driver package at least "197.45_desktop_win7_winvista_64bit_english_whql". I was hoping this would avoid conflicts. Now I'm wondering if I should have done just the opposite and went with some type of ATI card so that two separate drivers are installed.

I really don't know what else to try... I will put the second card in again and try to see if I can get into safe mode at all. Even if I could, though, I don't know what I could do from there. The correct driver is already installed.

 

[cspannos]

So, a couple of things....

I put the new 8400GS card in again and tried to boot into Safe Mode. No luck. It gets stuck on loading \windows\system32\DRIVERS\CLASSPNP.SYS.

I tried boot logging, but it still gets stuck on the "Starting Windows" screen and there is no ntbtlog.txt to speak of. I don't know why the log is not being created.

I took the 8400GS card out, booted up normally, and completely uninstalled the NVIDIA drivers. I put the 8400GS back in and tried to boot. It still hangs on "Starting Windows".

Sigh....

 

[edijs]

What about booting the system with the 8400 only? Let the OS know that a video card should be expected in a PCI slot. Maybe even install that same driver package. Then shut down the PC and put the PCI-express card in. After that, try to boot up with both cards plugged in.

 

[cspannos]

I was soooo close! I did what you said, installed the 8400GS by itself. Everything worked great, got all 4 displays working decently (at least for a PCI card). Windows installed a PCI-PCI Bridge or something while installing the drivers for the card, so I thought that must of been the problem.... just like you said, letting windows know a PCI card should be there. Anyway, after I shut down and put the GTX295 back in I end up with the same problem. It's still stuck on "Starting Windows".

BTW, I just noticed earlier today that new drivers were released a few days ago. I did all the above using the latest 257.21_desktop_win7_winvista_64bit_english_whql package from NVIDIA's site.

This sucks.