Has anyone hooked up 6 monitors in Vista 64-bit?

[JS99]

I am trying to see if I can get more than 4 monitors hooked up in Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Right now I already have a Radeon 4850 X2 driving 4 monitors, and today I went and bought another card, a Radeon 3870 with dual head display. Silly me, I thought that I could just place it in the PC and that it would work alongside the original. Fat chance. Anyways, the minute I plugged it in, the computer took forever to boot, the CPU started railing at 100% on bootup (mind you this is a Core i7 920 we're talking about here with 12 Gigs of RAM, not exactly a weak machine), and my 4 monitors attached to the 4850 x2 flickered on and off. When I removed the second card everything went back to normal.

I talked to someone about this and he said that Vista doesn't support more than 4 monitors with "retail hardware", and that plugging in a second card will just cause these types of problems if I am already running a quad-display card in the system. He suggested going with some type of Matrox "commercial" solution, which is out of the question for me at the moment, since I am not getting rid of my original card.

Can someone please explain to me why the idiots at Microsoft can't make their next-gen operating system support the same number of monitors as easily as their previous one? Or was the guy wrong and has someone actually done this successfully?

 

[EAZY-E]

Well if you where having problems from when it booted, thats not a vista problem, its a hardware problem. Have you tried taking your 4850X2 out and starting your computer with just the 3870 in? (to make sure that the card works) How could you tell that your cpu was at 100%, if you had no display? Were you getting picture on your 2 monitors hooked up to the 3870?

P.S. I totally agree with you in that multi-monitor support in vista is complete complete crap. You cant even do multi monitor spans! Sure my second monitor is awesome when doing video editing, photoshop, and music creation, but its completely useless for gaming .

 

[JS99]

Turns out I had it in a 4x PCI-E slot, which wasn't right - needed to be in a 16x slot. Also apparently I had to install a new driver, which I didn't do (this is on advice from someone else). I didn't actually do the correct steps however, just returned the card and am working with 4 monitors for now since I changed my mind. However, I have it on good authority that if you want to use more than 4 monitors in vista, the way to do it is to get a duplicate second card (another 4850 X2), uninstall the ATI drivers, insert the second card in the 16x PCI slot, then boot up and install the latest drivers from ATI's site. Apparently this would work, although I haven't actually tried it and won't for some time. Maybe I'll just wait until Win 7 comes out...