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Old 01-10-2009, 11:55 AM   #18
Rick Simon
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Join Date: Nov 2008
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Location: Michigan
Posts: 93
Originally posted by cjmaddy:
Reading your posts 299 and 301, our primary and secondary monitors are/were behaving in a similar way. Things improved with 8b, - see my 297 post.  
To be honest, with the sheer number of possible configurations, I don't tend to pay much attention to "primary" and "secondary" monitor names. It can mean a lot of different things on different systems. For instance, I happen to be running a PCIe Radeon 9550 which happens to be a dual output card and a PCI GeForce FX5200. In this case, the 9550 has "primary" and "secondary" outputs while the FX5200 has only a single output. Since PCIe happens to have the priority on this motherboard, the 9550's primary/secondary naming does happen to hold true. What if the situation was reversed though? What if I were running a PCIe GeForce MX400 which has only a single output and a PCI Radeon 9250 which has dual outputs? Since the MX400 is PCIe it would have priority and be the "primary" monitor for the system. Or perhaps I might be using a system with two video cards that each only support one output. Which one is "primary" and which one is "secondary" under that scenario?

Nor do the fun and games end there. I've run across quite a few motherboards that let you select in the BIOS which type of slot (AGP/PCI for instance) receives priority as the "primary" video output. How does that affect the "primary" and "secondary" display? There are also things like the Matrox Dualhead2Go to further complicate matters a bit. And then there is always the fun of Windows to be tossed into the mix. You can pretty much select any of your displays and assign it as the "primary" as far as Windows is concerned.

All in all, while the "primary" and "secondary" names can be meaningful in situations where you are only dealing with a single video card with dual outputs, or two single output cards where one of them is AGP/PCIe and the other is straight PCI, there are also a lot of other scenarios where it gets a lot murkier. That's why I tend not to pay much attention to those names.
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