Hi,

I have a HP Pavilion computer that has the video card built into the motherboard, I want to run dual monitors on the computer.

Can I using the existing video card setup and get another video card to run the second monitor, or do I need to get a dual monitor video card?

Or is there any other options for a dual monitor setup.

This computer is not for high speed graphics.

No gaming on this system.

Just need to know the best way to approach this situation or what you would recommend.

Thanks,

OkNowWhat

If the graphics card you have now has two video output ports on it, then you can just connect a 2nd monitor to it.

If it does't, then you could buy an old PCI card and put it in a spare PCI slot (if you have room) and use that for a second monitor, or another option would be to buy a graphics card with 2 video outputs.

I don't know if there's any benefits of using two seperate video cards to one video card though.

Originally Posted by Everlong18

If the graphics card you have now has two video output ports on it, then you can just connect a 2nd monitor to it.

If it does't, then you could buy an old PCI card and put it in a spare PCI slot (if you have room) and use that for a second monitor, or another option would be to buy a graphics card with 2 video outputs.

I don't know if there's any benefits of using two seperate video cards to one video card though.

Sorry too say but you can't do that in Vista; two different video cards (in this case onboard and a card) as Vista won't allow it,

All graphics adapters in a system must use the same display driver model. That is, all of them should either be running XPDM or WDDM. The driver models are mutually exclusive, and Windows Vista does not allow the simultaneous loading of both an XPDM driver and a WDDM driver.
If a system has one graphics adapter with a XPDM driver and another with a WDDM driver, then Windows Vista will choose the POST device, which is the one with VGA resources. This is commonly referred to as the "VGA adapter."

•If multiple graphics adapters are present in a system, all of them must use the same WDDM driver. If there are two graphics adapters with WDDM drivers from two different manufacturers, then Windows will disable one of them. The VGA adapter will be enabled, and the second device will be disabled.

MultiMonitor Support and Windows Vista

so yes if his current onboard doesn't support dual monitor then he will need a card that does.

Ah yea, I missed the bit that said he had an onboard video card. Thought he had an actual graphics card, which is why I said buy a cheap PCI card.

If you don't want to get a dual monitor video card and bother with opening up your computer, you can achieve a dual monitor setup using a DualHead2Go. It connects to a single VGA or DVI output on a laptop or desktop system, and allows you to hook up two monitors.