Two ATI Cards, Same PC?

[stahlhart]

Has anyone had any luck getting two ATI cards, an AGP and a PCI, working together and cooperating in the same PC?

Here's my scenario: for my initial foray into DVD creation from VHS sources, I didn't do my research thoroughly enough (particularly with respect to the issue of interlacing vs. deinterlacing), and went with a Plextor PX-M402U capture device. While I have had tremendous success with it so far, in terms of installation, operation and system stability, the limitation I ran into with it's deinterlacing of all captures has become the one and only one annoyance I have run into thus far. Some here would probably argue that that's a pretty major one.

So I gave it another shot and picked up a PCI AIW Radeon (I think it's the 7200 series), and have also been tinkering around with this, figuring that if I could get it to work okay, I'd be able to add the ability to do interlaced captures to the tools at hand.

I've been successful getting the AIW installed on its own in my system, with the latest Catalyst drivers (5.4) and MMC 8.9. Since I got the card used, and just the bare card, I haven't been able to test captures with it yet, until the 8-pin I/O cable I found and ordered arrives; should get here in a few days, though.

Here's the rub, though: the AIW seems to insist on being the only display adapter allowed in the system in order for Device Manager -- and the operating system in general -- to see all of its hardware features. If I have my AGP card, a 9500 Pro, also installed, the six AIW devices all show up with yellow splats in Device Manager. If I pull the 9500 Pro and set BIOS to use PCI for the diaplay adapter, everything works fine.

I have a feeling that this is something I will be stuck with -- pulling out the 9500 Pro and running exclusively on the AIW if I'm using the PC to do interlaced captures. Other alternatives appear to be (1) lose the 9500 Pro and get an AGP AIW, (2) lose the PCI AIW and get a different PCI capture card altogether.

Or mabye I should just stop being a lunkhead and get the right hardware for the job up front.

But I was just wondering if anyone else out there (Lord Smurf?) had any luck with dual ATI cards, in that mabye there's an installation trick I missed.

I also got a TBC, by the way, one of those 8710 boxes from B&H. It works well so far with the 402U, leaving aside the deinterlacing issue. Plextor is going to come out with a driver update that may address this issue, so I'm going to hang onto it for now to see how that turns out before I make any more misguided hardware changes.

Anyone?

C.K.

[redwudz]

The only thing I can suggest, if you haven't tried it, is to use a different PCI slot. The two cards may have a IRQ conflict.

[stahlhart]

Tried that -- I had two open PCI slots -- but no change to the end result.

I was just thinking that, even if I didn't have a display connected to the AIW, I could still set it up as an ancillary capture card. Turns out that that isn't the case.

Which is a shame, because it's quite a nice working card so far. Just not fast enough for 3D gaming. 2D is beautiful, though.

This is one of those dumb moments in life where you try to go the cheaper route, and it ends up costing more in the long run. The AIW didn't really cost me all that much at all. I just thought that it would have been cool if they could have both worked in the same system.

I'll probably keep an eye out for an AGP AIW; mabye the prices on them will drop once more people upgrade to PCIe.

C.K.

[Richard_G]

Halfway through reading your post, I found myself thinking, why doesn't he just remove the AGP video card and leave the AIW to do what it is intended for? Then I saw the reason, 3D gaming. As the requirements for 3D gaming and video capture and processing are totally different, I would suggest 2 separate machines. One for one job, one for the other (it'll also allow you to play games while video is encoding for hours on end!).

[dcsos]

dO YOUR INSTALLS IN THE REVERSE ODER..THIS IS, STAR WITH THE agp CARD ONLY load os THEN ADD pci..OR IF YOU DID THIS, REVERSE THE ACTION...
oTHERWISE..cALL ati IN canada..THEY KNOW THEIR STUFF AND WILL BE ONLY TO HAPPY TO CHARGE YOU TO TALK ABOUT IT!

[stahlhart]

That's another option -- I almost have enough spare parts to build another PC. I was actually going to, not because it had anything to do with video capturing, but because I still wanted to be able to play some older games with true Aureal 3D audio. Just a rainy day project I haven't gotten around to yet.

The major hardware changes -- including the addition of a 200Gb SATA HD -- were made to the main system, with the expectation that that would be the one I'd be doing the video work on, as it has the fastest CPU I own and I figured that that would come in handy for encoding etc.

I just know at this point that I'm going to end up with something like a 9700 or 9800 AGP AIW, to get the best of both worlds in one card (and to get some additional gaming speed over the 9500 Pro, which an external capture device wouldn't get me). It was just that that was going to be a bigger investment that I didn't want to make right now, having got all of the rest of the stuff like the TBC and such.

Probably should have just gone with the AGP AIW instead of the Plextor...

C.K.

[pfh]

Never tried it but can't you just disable which ever card you don't need in device mangler and set up separate hardware profiles?...........May require a reboot each time but if it save ya from yanking the cards in and out!....

About the interlacing thing- the more I read the more confused. I came to realize that for commercial vhs sources one would actually be talking about an inverse telecine process. This would reverse the telecine process they were created with. I have yet to find the time to try it! then I have to wonder if it's even worth it considering the vhs source to begin with.

[stahlhart]

That's an idea worth trying -- I hadn't even considered that. I am somewhat uncomfortable with repeated card insertions/removals, as it can't possibly be good for the sockets on the motherboard in the long term. I'll look into this further; thanks for the suggestion...

The deinterlacing is most noticable in "live" video segments; it's not really that noticable for movie film on video. In my case, the first test recording was an episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" that I taped off of cable back in the 90s (master tape, hi-fi SP, no recording generations) -- so for the video segments of the program the "blur" from fast motion could be seen somewhat easily, taking some of the "live" quality out of it, but the scenes where they're in the theater watching the movie look fine, at least to me.

The Plextor driver update is supposed to provide for different modes of deinterlacing, one better for faster motion, one for slower motion, and then the default setting.

It's a shame because it really is a great working unit besides this -- I got a full two hours of capture with no audio/video sync issues, no frame drops, roughly 50-70% CPU utilization during capture (Athlon XP2500+), and the resultant DiVX/MPEG-4 AVI converted to DVD format nicely using the DiVXtoDVD tool. The AVT-8710 interfaces to it nicely via S-Video. It's just a shame that Plextor left out the ability to do interlaced capture.

C.K.

[pfh]

Yeah, I'm happy with mine too. Apparently the "engineering" between the Philips chip and the WIS chip can't handle interlaced, therefore the need for progressive. In other words, it captures as interlaced via the Philips chip but then is changed to progressive before it reaches the WIS chip and is output.

[Febre]

Give this place a try:

http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/search.asp

I use to hang out there when I was interested in setting up a multi-monitor set up. Their gallery is pretty cool and there's a lot of good examples of multiple ATI card setups.

One of their suggestions for setting up a multi-monitor setup with an agp and pci was to use vid cards of the same series.

You should also check ATI's site for the newest drivers and see if they have any help in running dual vid cards. I use Nvidia and their Forceware drivers do a great job with dual vid cards; I'm sure ATI must have something similar.

Hope this helps you

[mattyboy]

i have an X800 Pro and a tv wonder (pci) in the same computer and it work fine. Theve been in there forever through many OS installs and such. The only issue I had was before SP2 was out I had to DL separate updates that microsoft gave me a link to so the tv tuner would stop freezing because it didnt work well with a HT CPU.

[chemame]

Your problem reminds me of a similar one I had that I ended up blaming on ATI's insistance on being the primary (sometimes only) card in order to work... and my problem didn't even involve two ATI cards!

I once tried to rebuild my capture system using an MSI motherboard, it was a K7N2G... cheap little board, but one that I like alot as it's VERY stable. Anyway, the N2G has onboard Nvidia geForce, tv out, etc...

...the best I could do was get windows to use the display drivers for my AGP AIW Radeon 9600. I could install all the ATI MMC stuff, but whenever I went to start MMC, it failed, and the diagnostics told me it failed because the ATI card was SECONDARY....

...but I had disabled the onboard video. It didn't appear anywhere, not even as hardware with no drivers loaded... didn't even appear to windows as a device. The ATI card WAS the only one in the system, but something about the way the mobo was reporting it, MMC didn't like it.

After a little research, and finding that many had the same problem with the K7N2G and ATI AIW, I gave up and went back to my other mobo, no problems. Same installation steps, no problems.

My conclusion: ATI AIW is checking for something at the device level that either isn't guaranteed, or isn't truly necessary in order to function. I can come up with no other explanation why it refuses to run MMC in my K7N2G... oh well, chalk another one to poorly written drivers I suppose.

Chemame.

[stahlhart]

Febre: thanks very much for that recommendation; I'll do some looking around here.

chemame, mattyboy: your experiences lead me to one other possible conclusion -- that success or failure here might be a matter of which two cards are getting put onto which motherboard. It could very well be one of these hit-or-miss things where either the stars line up for you or they don't.

I took one shot at the hardware profiles per pfh's suggestion; while I got the profiles set up successfully, at first glance it appears that the conflict is occurring at a level underneath this, because I still get the same results by the time the operating system (W2K SP4) is loaded. I'm going to tinker around with it some more, though, just to make sure.

I also wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for the responses to my post; I just joined these forums and this was the first one, and I tremendously appreciate all of your participation and ideas; thanks very much...

C.K.