Ever since PCI express slots were available on motherboards, I have been running dual NVIDIA graphics cards for quad displays under Windows XP. When Vista arrived I decided to design a new rig with dual 8800GTXs at it’s core. The quad displays worked fine as they did before, however now under Vista Ultimate x64 albeit with questionable drivers. The system was shaky with blue screens left and right with no logical reasoning. The driver support from NVIDIA was abysmal for both their 8800 video chipset as well as their 680i motherboard chipset. In an earlier post you saw how I couldn’t stand it anymore and I dropped Vista for the time being and went back to XP.
Well after reinstalling XP Pro I could only get two monitors operational. I decided to give BFG tech support a call for some assistance. When I described the problem I was having they quick answer was “We don’t support more than two displays on a system”. I said the unit has 4 available ports with two cards why is there no support for this configuration. He was steadfast in his answer. I informed him I have been running quad configurations in this manner with both the 6800 and 7900 series of cards. I asked what was different about the 8800 series that it cannot support quad monitors. He couldn’t give me answer a straight answer. I then stated if it is not supported why it is not displayed on a FAQ on their site or on the box. I then asked him what I should do with $1200 worth of video cards. His answer was returning them. At that point there was a long pause on my end, as I tried to keep myself from blowing up on the technician. I guess he figured I was at that stage and asked if I would like to speak to a supervisor, which I agreed too.
I was on hold for at least 15 – 20 minutes. At this point I figured he thought I would drop off the call from the long wait. Out of pure principle I was ready to stay on hold for the rest of the day until someone picked up the phone. The technician came back and told me his supervisor was unavailable and would call me in a couple of hours. In the meantime you might want to try this, he said. He told me to remove all the graphics drivers from the system first. Then reboot the system with only one card installed. When the system back was up, I was told install the drivers for the card and then reboot. Once the system was back again, to power down once again and install the second card. Upon the next reboot the second video card drivers were installed. Then once again reboot the system and then configure the quad displays. This time everything worked as it should. If this guy knew this, why put me through the ringer for about a half an hour before giving me the correct answer. Oh and by the way the supervisor never called me back. Everyone always says that BFG has stupendous tech support. Well, not in my book and this will be the last BFG product I ever buy.