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Problem: At the moment I am running with a display port monitor on a AMD R9 290 and I wish to connect another display port monitor to my computer. My mainboard does not feature a display port connector and my graphics adapter has only one.

Question: Now a friend of mine is offering me a used Matrox M9128 LP PCIe x16 and I am curious. Would I be abled to use this GPU in addition to mine to connect another one or two display port monitors still using my main GPU for graphics acceleration?

Thank you very much for your help!

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  • What operating system are you using? (Be as specific as possible.)
    – David Schwartz
    Jul 18, 2014 at 22:20
  • I am using Windows 8.1 x64 and I did check I have the slot and bandwidth free to use another card.
    – Bohne
    Jul 18, 2014 at 22:22
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    What do you mean by connect another one or two display port monitors still using my main GPU for graphics acceleration? Any monitors connected to the new graphics card would be driven by the GPU on that new card, not your original.
    – heavyd
    Jul 18, 2014 at 22:28
  • heavyd: I had an additional monitor connected to the onboard Intel GPU on DVI on a different PC while utilizing the NVIDIA acceleration of a dedicated GPU of that PC. So a different use case was working (Windows 7 at the time).
    – Bohne
    Jul 18, 2014 at 22:30
  • I'm still not quire sure what you mean. They whole reason they put GPUs in the graphics cards is so that the GPU is close to the video memory and doesn't have to travel across the slow PCI bus. You can definitely use multiple cards simultaneously, but I don't see how or why you would want a monitor to be driven by a GPU not on the same video card.
    – heavyd
    Jul 18, 2014 at 22:36

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Electrically you would be able to connect one monitor to the DP on your R9 and one or two more monitors top the Matrox card. The only problem you may run into are the drivers.

On windows XP and older you only had one single graphics driver.

From Vista onward (and that includes win8) you should be able to run multiple drivers and use both cards. I specifically write should since there have been incompatibilities in drivers.

Ofcourse you can also completely replace the R9 card with the Matrox card and connect both display port monitors for that, though then both will use the GPU on the Matrox card and I suspect that you want to use the R9 for gaming. In which case: Please realise that the monitor connected to the R9 might be much faster than the monitor(s) connected to the Matrox card.

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  • It is quite sad but I am unable to find experiences on the internet about said Matrox GPU so do you know of any special incompatibilities in this case? I will make sure to report when I tried...
    – Bohne
    Jul 18, 2014 at 22:46
  • The problems I heard off were between AMD/ATI and Nvidia cards. Partially that might be because Matrox cards tend to be a little rare these days. Matrix was a big player a decade ago, in 2D time, and still makes the best cards for exotic setups requiring dozens of monitors etc etc. But most regular PC graphics cards tend to be from AMD/ATI and Nvidia and these focus around gaming cards. The non-gaming cards they still are the 'lesser' variant which are still based on their big gaming card designs.
    – Hennes
    Jul 19, 2014 at 8:36

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