# Dual Video Cards Setup (different chipsets)?

## don quixada

Hi, I have two video cards in my machine and I want to hook one monitor to each card. Each card has a different chipset, one is Nvidia and the other is ATI. Will these cards work harmoniously? 

```
# lspci | grep VGA

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 630] (rev a1)

06:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Turks PRO [Radeon HD 6570]

```

Any good tutorials online for dual heads with multiple video cards? There are so many to choose from but none seem to quite address this scenario... Thanks.

dq

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## Ant P.

It's possible, but you'll need two separate X servers for now. The infrastructure for multiple cards rendering to a single screen isn't finished yet.

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## don quixada

Oh wow, sounds complicated! Maybe I should just stick to dual heads on one card. I read somewhere that Gnome 3 doesn't work well with dual monitors set-up. I thought I could beat the system by just having two cards (I had an extra one kicking around). What do you think is better, having two parallel servers and two cards or one card and one server? Or is that even an answerable question?

dq

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## Ant P.

Depends largely on what you use the system for. If you use fullscreen apps a lot having the ability to isolate them on one of 2 cards might be a good thing, otherwise it's just a lot of added complexity to deal with. Either of those video cards on their own is more than fast enough for an average desktop.

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## don quixada

Yeah, I only need them for normal desktop usage so I should probably just use one although maybe the non-used one can be a bitcoin miner...? :-P 

dq

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## Anon-E-moose

I'm running two cards (nvidia gt 210 and radeon 6670).

But I'm only using the nvidia for X.

I'm using the radeon for qemu passthrough (XP and win 7 - though 7 is troublesome at the moment during multiple reboots) for windows games.

For dual monitor, I'd probably stick with one card.

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