Dual Monitor Support

[JonnyAlpha]

Hi;

I am trying to sort out some PC's at work, they are all DELL and have onboard Gfx and a PCI Gfx Card.
The standard monitor is a 17 Inch DELL and is connected via a DVI cable to the PCI Gfx Card which is also DVI.
We have some NEC 24 Inch Monitors and want to attach them but also use the Standard Monitors in a dual monitor environment.

I think the onboard Gfx is disabled as we have attempted to connect the spare monitor to the onboard Gfx but there is no signal.

Both monitors have VGA and DVI input.

These PCs are supported by an agency so we cannot make any changes to BIOS and access in Control Panel is limited. We have contacted the agency who have responded saying that additional Hardware is required so this post is an effort to try and identify what we need to resolve this.

Can the onboard and PCI video be enabled simultaneously, or do we need some form of splitter cable?

[Da_Rude_Baboon]

In my experience you can not have the onboard VGA working along side a separate add in card. You would need a splitter cable but that would only give you the same thing on both screens. I believe you do get cables these days which allow you to connect a monitor to a USB port.

[mikeiver]

Depending on the cards in the box, the DVI port has support for a pair of monitors. In the case of Dell computers that card generally have a dongle cable with a special connector that attaches to the Vid card and has a pair of DVI connectors on it. There is also settings that need to be made in the control panel to tell windows that you wish to use both monitor outputs. In addition you will set up the different windows and how they are displayed. You fail to provide much info in the model cards in question so that will have to do for now.

Mike

[JonnyAlpha]

The DELL is an Optiplex G620, however the Gfx Card is the lower end model the 128MB ATI Radeon X600 SE which does not support dual monitor.