Dual monitor setup, with One or Two video cards

"Two cards for two monitors is quite possible. This box has two cards driving 3 monitors and I've been doing the same thing for years. 80% of the office machines are running two monitors on two cards.

Experiences:

Last I knew you couldn't mix ATI and NVidia cards--the drivers got in a fight. It's quite possible this has been fixed since the last time I looked into it.

As a general rule, two cards that use the same driver will coexist happily although I have seen odd-brand ones that won't.

Installation can be tricky--sometimes the drivers have to be installed in a certain order to work. If you're having trouble try every permutation you can think of. One old config at the office was Driver A, Driver B, Driver A. Close everything and enable the second monitor, when the machine hard-locked hit the reset button. If the new state got written to disk before it locked you're good to go. If not, maybe you can try again, maybe you have to rip out the drivers and start over.

The automated installation programs often can't handle a second monitor. I've had much better luck using downloaded drivers and installing the driver from the control panel--a few drivers won't work that way, we've not had much success ever getting those cards to work."

"I have two mediocre NvIdia cards that drive my 3 monitors. One exceptional thing I had to buy is SLI motherboard that could host 2 cards at the same time.

Try for them to be exactly the same. There are issues if ther aren't, but it still is working."