GT 1030 and GT 520 in one PC
 

Hello,

I want to use the GT 1030 as main graphics card/gpu and the GT 520 as an HDMI/audio solution to try this out.

So I stuck the GT 520 into the PC as well. It has two PCI express ports/slots (winfast motherboard NF4SK8AA (or similiar))

Windows 7 ultimate edition 64 bit is not detecting the GT 520 at the moment..

Only the GT 1030 is detected and working with installed driver.

The installed driver is currently:

417.35-desktop-win8-win7-64bit-international-whql-rp.exe

(Older drivers are available online and on my system, however they contain some security issues).

I have run two 7900 gtx cards 512 mb in sli mode in the past but these got to hot.
These only required a single driver and was easy to setup.

The current experiment is not so much about increasing graphics performance but using graphics cards for different purposes.

It could also be handy for dual-monitor setup or cuda debugging.

So it would be nice if the current driver would work for both graphics cards.
However perhaps this newer driver does not support GT 520 anymore.

I am unfamiliar with how to setup multi-monitor/multi-graphics cards solutions.

Would windows normally detect both graphics cards out of the box ?!

Or does it require special driver installations ?

Does it require "two graphics drivers to be installed or just one" ?

Also perhaps I need to disable something in the bios, perhaps SLI ?

Or perhaps I need to tweak some setting in bios.

Or perhaps I need to fall back an older driver to make this work, but that would rule out this experiment cause I don't want to risk security issues via browsers/opengl/webgl hacks and such.

Very maybe a reboot might help but I doubt it.

Any ideas how to proceed and diagnose the problem ?

I am kinda surprised that windows 7 doesn't auto-detect the GT 520 usually it would detect at least something.

Perhaps it's a winfast motherboard issue ? Unfortunately I cannot really try an other operating system at the moment cause of bad cd/dvd drive.
This is a lesson learned though. It's usefull to install multi operating systems though when buying new computers in case "external boot devices and such" fail ;) Though I am not a big fan of multi-boot and such... bit risky also to run linux on my harddisk for example, so for now... hmmm rather not..
Fortunately newer hardware has all kinds of boot options (for now) :) but useless for me for now... I tried booting from flash sd but I don't think winfast supports this unless a bios update or something is done... this would need new bios firmware which doesn't exist as far as I know.

I also "invented" a nice trick while cleaning my pc to install second graphics card.

I use a little soda-stick... which is normally used to suck up coca cola and such... and attached it to my vaccum cleaner to suck up dust from hard to reach places ! =D Quite an invention... will google later if a more mature device already exists lol... I would expect so =D LOL.

Please advise with any advise you can give to get this second graphics card working on windows 7.

Bye,
Skybuck.

GT 1030 and GT 520 in one PC
 

I installed the last supported driver for GT 520:

391.35-desktop-win8-win7-64bit-international-whql.exe

As far as I can tell this did not solve any problems yet.

The GT 520 is not showing up.

At least now a driver is installed that should be able to support both drivers.
For now this is worthy of an experiment.

However it seems more like a hardware detection issue.

One thing I can think of is swapping the graphics cards.

Perhaps somehow the GT 1030 is detected first and some how disables the GT 520.

But first I will try a re-boot and see if there is anything in the bios that might be causing the GT 520 to not be detected.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

GT 1030 and GT 520 in one PC
 

Hmm it seems to be a winfast motherboard limitation, which I find kinda odd, in the manual at page 27 it says the following:

"In normal mode, only the PCI Express x16 slot near the CPU can be used for PCI Express x16 graphics cards."

So strangely enough this motherboard DOES support SLI... but when in "normal mode" it can only support one graphics card ?!

Why the hell would that be ?!

So weird ?!

Well this summer I plan to build a new computer... waiting for computex and ryzen 3 announcement... and then some analysis... hopefully it gonna be good.

Now that my widescreen monitor/dvi died and I am enjoying this vga monitor...

I could unplug the gt 1030 and instead use the GT 520... since the GT 520 does have vga connector and hdmi too...

So I could re-use the HDMI for HDMI output to see if it makes a difference when gaming compared to creative labs soundblaster.

I find that experiment kinda interesting... not much point cause I do play on low audio in wows... but still even with low audio some difference might be noticeable.

I think it's the CPU that mostly bottlenecks WOWS (world of warships) and not graphics cards... though I could be wrong... probably both bottlenecking a bit...

But not that much difference between a gt 520 and gt 1030... though it was also worth an experiment...

Brutal Doom runs really sweet on the GT 1030 though =D

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

P.S.: Have to do some re-building lol.

GT 1030 and GT 520 in one PC
 

In my experience when working with cards from that era, and especially cards
that span manufacturer generations like you are trying to accomplish, you
are only going to facing issues such as this.

I'm also not surprised that a manufacturer like WinFast couldn't build smart
enough PCI-Express lanes to be able to handle two discreet cards