Organground
Active member
Hi, my PCS machine has two identical Nvidia 210 video cards as I require four monitors when using a particular piece of software. Each card (let's call them A and B) has two digital outputs, DVI and HDMI. Card A feeds monitors 1 and 2, card B feeds monitors 3 and 4. My default monitor is 1. I only switch on monitors 2 3 and 4 when I'm running the specific software that requires multi-monitor useage. Motherboard is P6X58D-E.
I've recently been having problems getting monitor 3 to display - whether it was turned on or not, Windows would only detect it as a generic PnP monitor and wouldn't always display the correct resolution, even when the monitor was turned on. I suspect it's something to do with the monitor's EDID settings but it looks fearsomely complicated to change these, and I've partially fixed this by swapping the DVI outputs so that now card A's DVI supplies monitor 3 and card B supplies card 1. At least the monitor turns on and displays the correct resolution now when I switch it on. Note that when I swapped video outputs, using Windows I continued to make monitor 1 the default.
However, under the present arrangement by which card A supplies monitor 3, even though monitor 1 is still set as the default monitor, is the monitor with the Windows login screen and is the monitor with the Windows start orb, it's now monitor 3 that displays the BIOS settings and ASUS motherboard splash screen. Thus when I start Windows I don't see anything on Monitor 1 until the Windows login screen comes up. This is annoying, since if anything happens to the BIOS or Windows crashes, I have no way of knowing why Windows won't start if I don't turn on monitor3.
Is there any way I can switch graphics card B to be the one that supplies the BIOS splash screen etc during Windows bootup, so that Monitor 1 can continue to act as my default monitor, both when Windows is running AND when I'm booting into Windows? I can't find anything in either Windows (Nvidia settings or display under control panel) or in BIOS settings that determines which of the two identical graphics cards displays the boot-up sequence.
On a separate note, is there a reason why from time to time my BIOS settings keep changing? In particular, my OS is on an SSD (data files are on a hard disk drive) so I set the Marvell 9128 controller in BIOS to be AHCI rather than IDE (that is what I'm supposed to do, right)? But if Windows crashes, it goes back to IDE. And I've set an old PS2 mouse to be able to boot up Windows, since the PC is tucked away and the start button is a bit inaccessible. But again from time to time the mouse fails to boot up the PC and when I look in BIOS, it's gone back to being disabled to boot up using PS2.
I've recently been having problems getting monitor 3 to display - whether it was turned on or not, Windows would only detect it as a generic PnP monitor and wouldn't always display the correct resolution, even when the monitor was turned on. I suspect it's something to do with the monitor's EDID settings but it looks fearsomely complicated to change these, and I've partially fixed this by swapping the DVI outputs so that now card A's DVI supplies monitor 3 and card B supplies card 1. At least the monitor turns on and displays the correct resolution now when I switch it on. Note that when I swapped video outputs, using Windows I continued to make monitor 1 the default.
However, under the present arrangement by which card A supplies monitor 3, even though monitor 1 is still set as the default monitor, is the monitor with the Windows login screen and is the monitor with the Windows start orb, it's now monitor 3 that displays the BIOS settings and ASUS motherboard splash screen. Thus when I start Windows I don't see anything on Monitor 1 until the Windows login screen comes up. This is annoying, since if anything happens to the BIOS or Windows crashes, I have no way of knowing why Windows won't start if I don't turn on monitor3.
Is there any way I can switch graphics card B to be the one that supplies the BIOS splash screen etc during Windows bootup, so that Monitor 1 can continue to act as my default monitor, both when Windows is running AND when I'm booting into Windows? I can't find anything in either Windows (Nvidia settings or display under control panel) or in BIOS settings that determines which of the two identical graphics cards displays the boot-up sequence.
On a separate note, is there a reason why from time to time my BIOS settings keep changing? In particular, my OS is on an SSD (data files are on a hard disk drive) so I set the Marvell 9128 controller in BIOS to be AHCI rather than IDE (that is what I'm supposed to do, right)? But if Windows crashes, it goes back to IDE. And I've set an old PS2 mouse to be able to boot up Windows, since the PC is tucked away and the start button is a bit inaccessible. But again from time to time the mouse fails to boot up the PC and when I look in BIOS, it's gone back to being disabled to boot up using PS2.