Can you run two different types of video cards together.

Ive got a m17x that cooked one of its video cards, a member on here gave me a great deal on another 9800m and right now everything is great. But I started thinking, seeing how the Master Slot will accept a 260/280m card and the slave wont can I run a 260/280 in the Master Slot and keep the 9800m in the slave?

In the NVIDIA control panel you can disable SLI and choose to force render or have a card run PHYSICS, would the M17x run and utilize to GPU's if they were different?

 

thats a good question.

If the GPUs are reconized by the BIOS, and Sli is disabled, it may work

Not sure anyone has tried this though.

 

Some guy here in the forum was able to make work a GTX 260M and a GTX 280M together in a M17x

 

In an Area 51 M17x ie the gen 1 system, thatd be awesome.

 

For SLI to work, both of the cards need to be in the same GPU family. The 9800 is 1 or 2 families older than the 260/280, so there's almost no chance you'll get it to work in SLI.

The best alternative use of the card is in conjunction with an ATI card (4870 or 5870) for PhysX. You need to use a hacked nVidia driver, but it's one way to get hardware accelerated PhysX.

 

ATI and NVIDIA together, thatd be bad . So I coould instal a 5870 in the Slave slot and the 260/280 in the Master??? That would keep my Area 51 M17x viable for a couple more years.

On the the other subject, the newest drivers 25x.xx work for 9800ms and 260/280s thats why I was thinking they would "play" together. Now I know SLI wouldnt work because one there'd be no SLI cable and two the cards probably wont talk to each other. BUT you can configure in NVIDIA control pannel to force render frames or dedicate a card to PHYSICS.

Im doing all of this becasue Ive been informed that (1) 280 < (2) 9800m so Id imagine (1) 9800 slaved and (1) 260/280 > (1) 260/280

I really think I might try this, worse case scenario I resell the 260/280 card.

 

Yeh you should be able to use the 2nd Nvidia slave card as dedicated to PhysX in the Control panel.

I'm not to sure if the R1s support the 5870s. I don't think it is within the system BIOS so it most likely won't be able to POST.

Yeh for SLi to work you need 2 of the same cards. eg. 260 times 2 or 280s times 2 and then the SLi cable to connect both of them.

If you want the best performance for the R1s i'd go for dual 4870s or SLi 280m's. Thats just upgrading it more though. Just a suggestion however answering your initial post yeh give it a go. It should work. Worse comes to worse yeh just sell off the card.

Cheers.

 

ATI & Nvidia? How would you overcome driver issues?

 

There here several threads about it here is one: *HowTo*: ATI + NVIDIA PhysX Guide - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net

I believe it is a similar workaround for laptops as well. I remember someone posted that they used a 260 and a 4870 together, but can't find the post right now.

The jist of it is that 7 allows you to use seperate devices to power seperate monitors

where in vista this was not possible.

 

Interesting. Would be cool to see how it worked out.

 

Yup Thats correct I remember hearing that windows 7 allowed users to install both Nvidia and ATi drivers at the same time with no problems.

Cheers.