Hello all--

System specs: ASUS P5LD2-VM Rev 2, C2D, 2GB RAM, 250GB WD SATA Drive.
OS: JaS 10.4.8 AMD/Intel SSE2/SSE3

I'm trying to get my (PNY) Nvidia Quadro NVS 280 PCI card working alongside the internal Intel GMA 945 graphics adaptor for 3 displays, and I'll post here what I find.

At first, booting with this card in hung the system just after starting loginwindow.app. Natit output the following in the boot sequence:



I edited GeForce.kext, NVDANV40Hal.kext, and NVDAResman.kext, replacing IOPCIMatch value with my Device ID (032A) as mentioned here, but with no difference.

Then I changed the BIOS setting from PCIe/Internal to PCI/Internal (duh). Now it boots up, mirroring the boot screens on the Quadro monitors, goes to black screen for ~ 25 seconds after the grey apple spinner screen, then goes to dual head on the Quadro screens and garbage on the screen connected to the internal adaptor.

Performance is u-n-b-e-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-y s-l-o-w, although CPU doesn't seem to be doing much. System Profiler shows QE/CI supported on both Quadro screens, but if you click on a window you have to wait literally minutes before your click is registered. Also, it seems to get worse over time -- it starts out somewhat responsive, then degrades.

The Quadro is capable of driving 2 displays at 1600x1200, which I've done under Windows and Linux, but the highest resolution available in System Preferences is 1280x1024.

Any graphics gurus care to comment on what to try next?

An update:

Seems to work acceptably well with dual head for what I need if I don't mess with Display Options in System Prefs. I clicked through increasing the resolution to 1280x1024 (as high as it would go) on both screens attached to the Quadro -- this took *forever*, due to the sluggish performance. After a reboot, I unplugged the screen attached to the internal adaptor, and dual head seems to work pretty well so far.

I would like to get the other head going and the resolution up to the LCD native (1600x1200). As I see it, I have three options:

1. keep poking at things to see if I can get the Quadro and the internal to play nicely together.
2. cough up and buy something like a Quadro NVS 440 PCIe (up to 4 screens). Anyone tried this card (or other triple head capable cards) with osx86?
3. fake it by connecting my third screen to my laptop and running synergy to "fuse" the machines together.

you can use matrox triple head2go or dual head2go as well. I'm impressed you got it going at all, lol. Still think you should get a PCIe card, the slow PCI bus can't be good for much and the gma950 blows chunks.

I had a problem with installing a video card after doing an install with GMA950.

It appears that the OpenGL driver is different for intel than the nVidia (I posted on the P5LD-VM howto about this).

I did a from fresh install with the nVidia card installed and without GMA950 driver. I then installed Natit and had full QE/CI on dual display.

I don't think you'll be able to run triple with intel and nVidia, if you want 3 displays, the easiest solution may be to install another nVidia card.

Gimboid

Thanks for the input. I had to do a fresh install (Accidentally installed the 10.4.9 through software update -- don't do that!), and it was pretty much plug and play this time, installing with the Quadro card in the box and the internal adaptor unplugged.

Still only goes up to 1280x1024, tho. I'm thinking that a triple head capable PCIe card is going to be the best bet, but I'm not sure I want to drop $600 on the Quadro NVS 440 and hope that it will work...

I edited GeForce.kext, NVDANV40Hal.kext, and NVDAResman.kext so the device ID is 032A but after clearing the extensions cache and rebooting, the device ID for the video card still shows up as 018a. Any idea what I did wrong?

madur0

First Install Leopard Would go alot better with your pc and it might fix the problem