Is it possible to run two differnt video cards with one motherboard?

[neworldman]

I built a system for my high end 3d graphics cam/cad business. I have a Quadro 5000 video card. But I also bought a GeForce GTX 580 card. I was hoping to be able to game with my Quadro 5000 video card but it doesn't compare to my GeForce GTX 580 in gaming. Is there a way to run these two video cards in a mother board and have two ssd drives both with W7 Ultimate OS. Then one can run the Quadro 4000 video card and the other run the GeForce GTX 580? I know you can change to boot to what hard drive you want. But how do you separate the video cards? Thanks

[DB83]

There was a similar topic posted here a month or so ago.

Then I wrote, IIRC, this was not possible unless the two cards support the same system ie cross-fire or SLI. Your motherboard would have to support that as well.

I do not think putting two random cards in to on mainboard is a viable option. Even if the board supported that you would have to manually switch the graphics source at bios level each time you wanted to change the card and if you only had one monitor the cable would also have to be switched before rebooting. So you would, practically, also need two monitors.

But the first point of discussion is the mainboard. We do not know what you have and what it actually supports.

[aedipuss]

whether they will work together in one box depends on what nvidia chipset they use. 2 - 580's can only be run in sli, but a 580 and a 480 can be run separately to allow 4 monitors and it only works with nvidia card series 8000 and above.

your case might work as the quadro 5000 is based off the gf100(gtx480) chipset and the 580 uses the gf110. the unknown is whether or not you can install the 2 different drivers and have them work together as the normal gtx580/480 combo uses just one driver. getting a program to chose which one to use might also be a problem.....

[dragonkeeper]

If i understand your question correctly, you want to be able to run these cards on the same system utilizing seperate instalations of Windows 7 on different hard drives. This is totally plausible, but be aware that Windows 7 will aromatically try to install the driver for both cards but you can chose not to extend desktop to the second card. If you begin to have hardware conflicts you may have to disable the card through the system properties.

[neworldman]

If i understand your question correctly, you want to be able to run these cards on the same system utilizing seperate instalations of Windows 7 on different hard drives. This is totally plausible, but be aware that Windows 7 will aromatically try to install the driver for both cards but you can chose not to extend desktop to the second card. If you begin to have hardware conflicts you may have to disable the card through the system properties.

Yes that is exactly what I want to do. I have two SSD drive that will both have separate OS ...one XP & the other W7 Ultimate. So what is involved in doing this?

[dragonkeeper]

It's called dual boot, or mutli-boot. Here is a link to a guide that details the process. It's pretty straight forward.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html