Vista - 2 Identical Monitors and different Resolutions

I have two identical Syncmaster 205BW Monitors running on my 9800GX2 card. I want to run at 1400 x 1050 as that looks the best and font size.

BUT monitor 1. has a top available resolution of 1400 x 1050 at highest 32 Bit (slider is hard to the right). This is the Main Monitor.
Monitor 2 does NOT have 1400 x 1050 available and I have to run it at 1440 x 900 and there are more available higher settings right thru to 1680 x 1050.

Note when these same two monitors were connected to my previous 8800GTX on a Vista 32 bit system, they both ran fine at 1400 x 1050.

I have latest monitor inf from Samsung.

I note that in Control Panel/Personalize/Display settings, there is a ghost 3rd small monitor icon showing as 'Default Monitor' and it is greyed out. Not sure how to remove this or if it has any bearing?

This isn't a major problem, so I don't want to perform open heart surgery to correct it <smile>

Kotuku

They should both be at there Native Resolution.

Kotuku,

Try looking in device manager for a hidden monitor that is not attached - perhaps you'll need to go to View --> Show hidden devices to see it.

I appreciate monitors should be run at their Native Resolution, but you will see that Monitor 1 WILL NOT GO ABOVE 1400 x 1050. The slider is hard to the right and asking it to show anything else doesn't work.

While Monitor 2 can show 1680 x 1050 (this is the native resolution for these models, that makes the twin set-up look bad and makes dragging docs and spreadsheets between monitors too much of an eye strain.

Nope showing hidden devices doesn't show anything else as far as monitors, just the two Samsung's. And I am not sure that that ghost monitor has anything to do with the problem.

I bet it does - if you have 2 connected monitors then you should only have those showing not the third ghost.

I have used a dual mon setup for the last 6 years and never had a ghost.

Thus, I am betting that that is at the very least a symptom of the larger problem that you are experiencing.

Also, are both heads on the video card the same type (DVI-I, DVI-A, HDMI, etc)?

Umm, I have been using duals for 5 years and not seen a ghost either <smile>

They are not HDMI (not available on these monitors), but I am not sure of the difference between the other two, so I will go and google them. Just standard digital cables as far as I understand and as I said, same monitors connected to my old 8800GTX card both showed the same resolution.

I meant from the video card - are they identical heads or different type heads?

They appear to be identical heads. Attached photo grabbed from the web shows the 9800GTX at the bottom of the three.

I wonder if the fact that it is really two GPU's in SLI mode within the one card has anything to do with this problem?? SLI does not work with dual monitors!

OK, so what happens if you swap monitors on the card - does the resolution stay same (indicating that the card is forcing a weird resolution) or does it switch (indicating that the monitor is forcing weird resolutions)?