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I have a Radeon HD 5450 PCI Express card and a Radeon 9250 PCI card. The computer they're being installed in is running Windows XP SP3.

After installing the drivers for both cards, I get a BSOD with ati2mtag.sys as the culprit.

I know the 9250 is barely DirectX 9 capable and requires legacy drivers from AMD. For the HD 2000-4000 series, AMD has a legacy driver package. The 5450 isn't supported by this.

What's the best way to get these two cards to play nice in the same system? I've installed the drivers for both manually with and without installing the Catalyst Control Center with the same results. Switching init first between PCI-E and PCI has no effect.

The objective is to enable the use of four monitors without buying a new GPU.

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  • Why do you have two incompatiable devices? If either device use the driver files with the same name, what you want to do will not be possible, Windows XP won't allow it.
    – Ramhound
    Dec 1, 2011 at 18:19
  • Edited for clarity. These are the parts I have on hand.
    – Tyler Faile
    Dec 1, 2011 at 18:19
  • I have 10 year old graphics cards also, doesn't mean it will serve me any benefit to use them, why do you have two graphic cards installed? You cannot even link them so really only using one of them.
    – Ramhound
    Dec 1, 2011 at 18:20
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    Have you tried to provide the legacy card a generic Microsoft display driver? You can nothing by using the AMD driver, since that won't be the primary card, it sounds like by default both cards are trying to use the same driver file ( my guess the legacy card actually did at one time ).
    – Ramhound
    Dec 1, 2011 at 18:27
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    Get a new GPU. The 5450 is dirt cheap now, and even supports CrossFireX. Do yourself a favour, remove your headaches, and upgrade. I know that's not what you want to hear, but it's the easiest solution.
    – MBraedley
    Dec 1, 2011 at 19:38

1 Answer 1

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The best way is to install Windows Vista or 7 - the driver model makes these conflicts much less of a problem. There's no way you can get these two cards to work in tandem under XP as is and have proper functionality for four outputs, and I speak from the standpoint of a specialist in multiple monitor setups. Either buy new cards, or try another OS (I can't guarantee it'll work, but it's much more likely).

EDIT: Just to make this more explicit, since it came up in the comments, Ramhound is right that there's a very real possibility the older card Just Won't Work™ in a newer OS. In my experience, a lot of cards this age and older do work fine with the stock Microsoft drivers, but I can't speak for this particular one, so try at your own risk, of course. You're sure as hell not going to get them running under XP with any reasonable effort, though.

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    I still feel his problem stims from trying to use a legacy card and a current supported card, both of which likely use the same driver, so one of the cards will always attempt to use a driver. The fact he is getting a BSOD means, the device is trying to access a driver, and when it attempts to do [random hardware instruction here] it returns an invalid operation. Are we even sure the legacy drivers are support on Windows Vista/Windows 7 I am going to guess the answer is no
    – Ramhound
    Dec 1, 2011 at 18:36
  • Looking at the support operating system, it appears the legacy control software package, is only designed for Windows XP. This likely means it DOES NOT use the WMD driver model.
    – Ramhound
    Dec 1, 2011 at 18:40
  • @Ramhound - I agree that you're completely right, that's exactly the problem. As I said, I can't guarantee that the older card with will work under Vista/7 either, but in my experience a lot of cards around that age DO work okay (Microsoft has a lot of base WDDM drivers with the OS that give you core functionality and aren't available for download), and if it does work there should be no issues getting both to work simultaneously. I've edited the answer to be a bit more explicit. Thanks.
    – Shinrai
    Dec 1, 2011 at 18:40
  • I just made that comment so he understands the problem. Good Lord did i forget a bunch of words :$
    – Ramhound
    Dec 1, 2011 at 18:47

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