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I have 2 PCI, and 1 PCI Express, video cards.

Dell System DXP061
PCI Info
+---PEG [VGA, Multimedia]
+---SLOT 1 [not populated]
+---SLOT 3 [not populated]
+---SLOT 4 [PCI BRIDGE]
+---SLOT 5 [VGA]
+---SLOT 6 [not populated]

With no other cards inserted, all 3 work fine. But, when I have any combination of 2 cards, or all 3 cards at once, Ubuntu only recognizes the one that I have set as the primary display in the bios.

I want a dual monitor set-up. I am going to install v16.04 from a minimal iso image.

Should I:

  1. have just 1 card inserted at install time, and add another one later?
  2. have the 2 PCI cards inserted?
  3. have the PCI Express and 1 of the PCI cards inserted?
  4. have all 3 cards inserted and hope Ubuntu can make use of at least 2 of the 3?

note: The above test results are based on a 3 years old Ubuntu installation. I am now doing a new installation.

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4
  • That's how it is.
    – user589808
    Oct 2, 2016 at 15:43
  • @Celtic You mean Ubuntu recognizes only the one which is set as primary in BIOS?
    – mook765
    Oct 2, 2016 at 15:48
  • Have you checked for a BIOS update for your motherboard, or for the video cards? Exactly which cards do you have? One of them calls out as a pci bridge? Cheers, Al
    – heynnema
    Oct 2, 2016 at 15:53
  • Yes, but that's actually an hardware limitation. In a desktop you can use only one graphics card if the system has no SLI support or equivalent. If Windows allowed the monitors to be connected to the secondary it was using that card for the ports only and the drivers did the routing. Such feature isn't available in any Nvidia or AMD drivers for Linux.
    – user589808
    Oct 2, 2016 at 15:55

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

Sweet success. I removed the Radeon HD 7570 PCI-express and the ATI Radeon 7000 PCI cards. What I did use is the VGA and HDMI ports of the single NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS (which is recognized as PCI Bridge by the bios).

note: This does not really answer my question. But, I just want to say that I am no longer working on this problem.

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