Can You Put a PCI Express Video Card & a PCI Card in the Same Computer & Get Multiple Displays?
The main expansion slots used to connect graphics cards to a computer include peripheral component interconnect, PCI express and accelerated graphics port. AGP and PCI are both older interfaces, with the former no longer supported on most modern motherboards. PCIe, on the other hand, is the most common and best-performing interface for graphics processing units. Most motherboards have at least one PCIe slot and several PCI slots, but video cards installed to these slots cannot be used at the same time.
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SLI and CrossFire
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AMD CrossFire and NVIDIA scalable link interface enable a computer to use more than one GPU at a time, but these technologies have one major limitation: The cards installed to the motherboard must use the same GPU. Since PCIe and PCI are two different slots and therefore have different technological limitations, cards that use PCIe don't use the same GPU as cards that use PCI. Therefore, it's not possible to use CrossFire or SLI with one PCIe card and one PCI card simultaneously. Furthermore, SLI is designed for PCI Express exclusively.
BIOS
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The basic input/output system controls how hardware devices are configured when the computer boots. Users can change these device configurations via system setup, accessed before the computer loads the operating system. Most motherboards come with an option to select one of the following video outputs: integrated, PCI or PCIe. An integrated card is one that is built into the motherboard itself. Since most motherboards cannot process more than one video card at a time, system setup can't configure the computer to synchronize and run both a PCI and PCIe card. A few motherboards using certain Intel chipsets, however, don't have this same limitation and can output video on multiple monitors using separate cards. However, these boards are designed for use with an integrated card and a dedicated card, not with two dedicated cards.
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Windows
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Once a specific video output method is selected in the BIOS, the other cards become invisible to Windows. Windows uses device drivers to detect and communicate with hardware components, like the video card. If the software, or device drivers, for both dedicated cards are installed to the operating system at the same time, the OS may have difficulty figuring out which driver to use. If the OS uses the wrong driver, the computer may fail to output proper video.
Dual Monitors
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Some graphics cards can output video on multiple monitors at once, without requiring the use of multiple GPUs. These cards usually come with a single video graphics array port and a single digital video interface port, a single DVI port and a single high-definition multimedia interface port, or a single VGA port and a single HDMI port. One monitor plugs into the analog, or VGA, port, while the other plugs into the digital, or DVI or HDMI, port. Not all cards with multiple graphics ports supports multiple displays, however. Look at the card's product specifications or manual to see whether the card can output video on more than one monitor at a time.
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