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I currently have dual monitors and would like to upgrade to a triple monitor setup. My mother board, gigabyte ep43-ud3l, only has one PCIe x16 slot so I'm running into some issues. I've come up with 3 possible solutions. Which do you think will work best, if any? I am currently using one PCIe x16 8400GS on a DSDT setup. NVInstaller has also worked for this card.

 

1) Two card setup using my PCIe card, and a PCI 8400.

I found this post about using two cards, but it seems like they are using two PCIe cards, not a PCIe and PCI. This seems to be the easiest rout, but would this setup work?

 

2) An ATI 5000 series card with eyefinity 3 monitor support.

Last I check 5000s are still not supported, so this option would probably have to wait if it would even work at all. Anyone know if the eyefinity will be supported under osx86?

 

3) The JATON VIDEO-558PCI-Quad GeForce 8400 GS

This card, available at newegg, has dual 8400 chips. It seems to be the lowest performance for the price, but if all video outs would be supported under osx86 drivers it would be nice to have just one card. Would DSDT, NVInstaller, or any other methods work on a dual GPU card? This card is PCI, not PCIe.

 

Thanks for any help you can give!

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To me it seems it would be easier and cheaper to switch to something like the GA EP45-DS3 mobo. I have it it works great with two pcie videocards. At least with my two 7300 gs 512mb and I can´t see no reason why it should´nt works with other cards too.

 

Also Peach_os has a thread going about how to do it with two different cards too, don´t remember which mobo he has though. But to me it seems the chances for succes is better with a mobo with at least one 16 and one 8 slot.

 

Since your mobo does work with osx can´t bee too hard to sell it.

  • 1 month later...

Hi there ;) , has anyone tried triple monitors with the dual pcb GTX 295?? It has three connectors...2 dvi and 1 hdmi and if my understanding is correct, osx doesnt support sli , hence each pcb should be able to support the monitors and will only take up one slot. I get this idea since in windows if sli is disabled it allows you to run triple monitors without a fuss off the one (dual pcb) 295.

I have been trying to get option #1 working for the past several days with a PCI-E card and a PCI card on a Gigabyte G41M-ES2L running OS X 10.6.3, with no success. Both DVI ports on the PCI-E card (a 512 MB 9400GT) work fine, as I knew they would, since I am running the same card on a G31M-ES2L with no issues. As for the PCI card, I have tried a PNY 512 MB 8400GS, a PNY 256 MB FX5200, and a 32 MB ATi Radeon 7000 Mac Edition just for kicks (which shows up as a network card?). System Profiler "sees" all three of the above PCI cards, but doesn't recognize that a display is connected to it, and also doesn't recognize the amount of memory on the card, etc. The display, of course, never receives a signal.

 

I read somewhere that Gigabyte boards may need to use the PCI card as the "primary" card in order for this to work. I had been using the PCI-E as the primary, disabling onboard video (Intel X4500, which has no drivers yet, anyway), and hoping the OS would recognize the PCI card as a second video card. In the case of both NVIDIA cards, setting the PCI card to primary in the BIOS results in the Gray Screen Of Death ("You need to restart your computer...") immediately after the spinning wheel stops on the Apple logo screen. The ATi, meanwhile, doesn't even display the POST screen.

 

I have tried every combination of kexts and installers (NVinject, NVenabler, NVkush) I am comfortable with, but it always turns out the same. The third monitor isn't important enough to me to buy a new board (and therefore a new case), so I suppose I will just live with the two for now.

  • 1 year later...

If you're bound to a one card solution then your best bet is indeed an eyefinity card from AMD as curent nVidia cards are limited to 2 displays (clock issue). Netkas had posted somewhere that he got all DP ports on his eyefinity 6 5870 working and any 68xx eyefinity card will support 2 monitors and 3 more via active display port conversion for a total of 5 but getting os x to recognize all ports more than 3 has been a known hassle for a while now but still very much possible. Just realized also that this is quite an old thread...

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