VOGONS


First post, by Totempole

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I was thinking of combining a Radeon 9200 AGP and a Geforce FX5200 PCI. I'm not really wanting them both to work at the same time, but rather to be able to switch between them when needed.
Another combo I was thinking of was something like a Radeon 9200 AGP and maybe an S3 Trio PCI?

It should be fairly easy to switch between cards in the BIOS by selecting whether AGP or PCI VGA is initialized first, but I'm interested to find out how it would work.

Should I give it a go or am I setting myself up for disaster? 😊

My Retro Gaming PC:
Pentium III 450MHz Katmai Slot 1
Transcend 256MB PC133
Gigabyte GA-6BXC
MSI Geforce 2 MX400 AGP
Ensoniq ES1371 PCI
Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA

Reply 1 of 2, by Holering

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Assuming you get no IRQ conflicts you should be fine. Don't see what would prevent you from doing it otherwise.

Personally use a PCIE and PCI GPUs with Windows 98SE, and I can switch them no problem in Windows 98SE without rebooting or going into the bios; it's better and easier this way for me so I can stay away from the bios too.

My personal setup: bios boots with PCIE gpu so I can use it in Linux, Windows 7, or 98SE; when I'm in 98SE I just switch GPUs in display properties, along with my VGA switch box, or I just disable the PCIE card in device manager and use my switch box while booting 98SE.

For the record, I tried using Windows 95C the same way but I couldn't avoid lockups and bluescreens. Maybe disabling PCIE gpu in safe mode would work?

Reply 2 of 2, by obobskivich

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IIRC Win98 will support "hardware profiles" where you could just set one for which card/drivers you want to use, and switch those. I think it requires a reboot but it should work if you really want to disable the card. As far as installing both cards in a system - should be no problem as far as the hardware is concerned, and the only "hang-up" could be the drivers. I honestly don't remember how 98 plays with different-brand graphics drivers - I know XP and 7 could not care less, but Vista hangs up on it in most cases. I also know some of the control panel features between ATi and nVidia will over-lap and it can create oddity (esp if you enable HydraVision + nView at the same time).