Display cards don't like each other.

Hello all,

I am trying to run a eVGA 7950 GT KO card with a Matrox G450 MMS x4 card for a total of 6 displays.

I have had 6 monitors running on my old machine with a ATI 9800Pro with a Matrox G-200

The new machine is an Asus P5W-DH Deluxe. The eVGA is in the PCI-E and the Matrox is in the PCI slot.

Individually they both work fine. The eVGA shows 2 displays, and then the Matrox displays 4 monitors. But together there are problems.

With both cards in the MB all boots well and Device Manager is happy...but. When I go to Display Settings I get a message:

"The currently selected graphics display driver cannot be used. It was written for a previous version of Windows. And is no longer compatible with this version of windows. The system has been started using the default VGA driver."

The previous version error thing is a bunch of crap since each cards works well individually with my Windows XP Pro SP2. I've tried swapping the PCI card to other slots and tried the latest drivers and some older drivers for no fix.

I am tempted to using a REGEDIT modification from seeing an article that says:
"
The SessionPoolSize registry entry specifies the session paged pool in megabytes. The default value for the session paged pool is 16 MB. If sufficient memory is available, Windows may also allocate 32 MB. This memory is used for video driver allocations."

I am suspect that there is not enough video memory allocated for both cards to work. The eVGA is a 512M card and the Matrox is a 128M card.

Would someone please advise me if I am going in the right direction ?

UPDATE: I just installed a Matrox G-200 with the eVGA 7950 and they work together. Now I get 6 displays in the Display Manager. Hmmmm....now why isn't the G-450 working ????

UPDATE: I put the G-450 card in and boosted the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\SessionPoolSize registry entry from 4 to 512 with no effect. Still get the "currently selected graphics display driver cannot be used...". error message. Hmmmm now I am stumped.



Regards,

Jim :? :?

UPDATE: I had a theory that maybe I had a memory size problem by using the Matrox G-450 with the eVGA 7950GT, so I went out and bought a cheap PCI-E card. It is a GForce PCX5750 128meg card. I installed it and .... crapps same problem.

Nvidia tech support just responded to my tech request e-mail. They were no help. I thought these people were supposed to be experts. They don't know azz from a hole in the ground.

How can I compare the successful driver load with the G-200 card vs. the unsuccessful driver load with the G-450 card? Is there any kind of boot stepping to be able to watch for the driver load sequence and success/conflict? I am using Windows XP Pro. I remember back with Windows 98 we were able to step through the driver loads in Safe Mode. Can XP do that too ?


Regards,

Jim

Thanks for the suggestion. Sorry for the longwinded description. This is not only a cry for help, but a troubleshooting log.

I tried the latest drivers already. There is just something unusual why the G-200 card works and the G-450 doesn't. They both pull their drivers from the same unified driver pack from Matrox.

Nvidia just wrote back again refusing any more help. Bummmmms


Regards,

Jim

The card that doesn't work for me is the Matrox G-450 quad PCI.

I tried a new experiment. I put in a cheap ATI card this time a X300 SE and voila it works with the G-450. So the trouble is with the Nvidia drivers in my situation.

All I can say to you is try different cards. I am in the process of seeing if Newegg will let me RMA this Nvidia 7950 GT card and replace it with an ATI.

Good luck.

Jim