how to add additional monitors in Windows Seven?

[Cixert]

I have a computer with four operating systems:
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Seven
Windows 10
And two video cards: an integrated ATI ES1000 and a dedicated Asus/Nvidia GeForce EN7300LE.
The card works as a secondary card in all operating systems except Windows Seven. in which no monitor appears connected.

I have a Sony Bravia TV connected to it via the VGA and S-Video outputs.
Windows 2000 and XP allow me to clone the VGA/S-Video outputs with different resolutions using the Nvidia panel. Windows 10 restricts this to the same resolution, meaning the lowest S-Video resolution, and the option is not included in the Nvidia driver.

The problem is that in Windows Seven, neither one nor the other is supported, no monitor appears connected.
The driver is installed correctly and appears in the Device Manager.
When I click on the Nvidia control panel this doesn't star, the following message appears:
"Nvidia display settings are not available."
"You are not using a display connected to an Nvidia GPU."

If I right-click on the desktop and go to the screen resolution menu, only the monitor connected to the integrated card appears.

-No other connected monitors appear in the device manager.
-I've tried several monitors, and they don't appear either.
-If I disconnect the integrated monitor and boot Seven with the dedicated card as the main card, it works perfectly, but then the integrated one stops working.
-If I uninstall the NVidia driver and use the Microsoft driver for Nvidia nothing changes.
-I've tried installing virtual video cards with virtual monitors, and the problem is similar. They appear in the device manager, but nowhere else.

I can't install ATI cards because the drivers conflict with the integrated one.

Edited June 5 by Cixert
RGB output = VGA

[Tripredacus]

What motherboard is it?

[Cixert]

5 hours ago, Tripredacus said:

What motherboard is it?

It is a Asus Server TS300-E4-PA4 with motherboard AsusP5M2.
When I wrote RGB/S-Video in the outputs of the dedicated video card, Asus EN7300LE for HP with chip Nvidia GeForce 7300, I meant VGA/S-Video, I edited it for clarity.

[Tripredacus]

Tidbits from the manual for reference
- a video card in the PCI-E x16 mechanical slot will run at 1x electrical
- board has an onboard VGA enable/disable jumper VGA_EN1

As I understand, the 1x electrical probably won't make a difference for 2D compositing but 3D could have performance issues. BIOS apparently has primary boot graphic adapter options either Auto or Force x1. Since this is a server class system, we can likely presume that this slot was not intended to be used for a video card. Even the manual talks about using storage controllers and while it does mention the electrical difference, I would bet that it was intended that the board with use either the onboard or a discrete adapter but not necessarily both. Even with PEG present, it still makes the onboard available. The fact it has the jumper would indicate to me that the intended configurations would be to have VGA_EN1 enabled if using onboard, or disabled if using a video card.

There is no mention of using multi-display for this board. What you describe (if I read it correctly) is that Windows 7 is only using the first display adapter that the BIOS makes available to the system. It is not necessarily disabling the other, which is why it appears in Device Manager. 

I have a couple of ideas but being able to find out if they are the right answer or not is difficult. This is another one of those types of questions that AI can't figure out because they aren't trained on the technical information. But basically this is what I can put together. First, WDDM 1.0 (from Vista, I don't know if just RTM, SP1 or what) was not designed to handle multiple display adapters and typically would use one and disable another. It was always third party implementations that had to be used to get multi-display to work, especially once hybrid graphics in notebooks started appearing. WDDM 1.1 in Windows 7 was supposed to correct this, and largely has. However there is a possibility that using a Vista driver on Windows 7 may have something hard-coded in it that is replicating this, or if your Win7 is modded in any sort of way to make this behaviour possible, although finding out what would do that might be impossible. 

The other thought that I had was that perhaps something is being set in an ACPI table by the system that 2000 and XP doesn't read, 10 may or may not read (but obviously the DDM in 10 is way more robust) and Win 7 does that causes this issue. Again, I don't know how to verify this, but just thinking of what Win7 could read from the system to make it behave this way.

But I still think that the intended way to use this board was to only have 1 display adapter, and that Win7 is working correctly and that the 2000, XP and 10 experiences are actually the outliers.

 

[Cixert]

On 6/6/2025 at 3:33 PM, Tripredacus said:

Tidbits from the manual for reference
- a video card in the PCI-E x16 mechanical slot will run at 1x electrical
- board has an onboard VGA enable/disable jumper VGA_EN1

(...)

There is no mention of using multi-display for this board. What you describe (if I read it correctly) is that Windows 7 is only using the first display adapter that the BIOS makes available to the system. It is not necessarily disabling the other, which is why it appears in Device Manager. 
(...)

 

Thanks for the research.
Where are you reading this?
"- a video card in the PCI-E x16 mechanical slot will run at 1x electrical"
I can't find it in the motherboard manual.
https://www.asus.com/sg/supportonly/p5m2sas/helpdesk_manual/
The BIOS has the following options:
Initialize video card
PEG/PCI
PCI/PEG
-Disable PEG.
-Force 1x
If I boot with the PEG/PCI option, the integrated graphics stop working in any operating system.
(integrated graphics = PCI)

In any case, virtual graphics cards aren't available either, so I'd rule out motherboard issues. I think the problem is with the operating system.

Edited Wednesday at 01:57 AM by Cixert

[Tripredacus]

This looks to be the same PDF that I downloaded (pdf page 13 and 42)

http://oldschooldaw.com/asus/2006/e3037_p5m2_series.pdf

It does not say exactly what I wrote, it does not mention mechanical vs electrical but that is what it is actually refering to in a broader sense. It may be that those particular terms were not common at the time this was written. I am not even sure that in a general sense that electrical is even the right term, since I doubt it is actually voltage based. Rather the limitations boards can have on their PCI-E slots are typically caused by bandwidth limitations. Nonetheless, any time you see any mention of a 16x running at a lower spec when a video card is inserted typically means that slot was not actually designed to have a video card put into it.

The manual doesn't seem to mention putting a video card into the PCI slot, I don't know if it would work with the onboard since they would both be on the same bus. 

This kind of reminds me of that one configuration I had to get working where I had a requirement that a computer be able to use the onboard sound in addition to 3 PCI sound cards and for them all to work independently. We tried everything but the only OS where it would work correctly ended up being Windows XP Pro 64 bit, which wasn't ideal because XP was going EOS very shortly afterwards (at least in comparison to a device lifecycle) and that configuration would not work on Vista of any version. 

[Cixert]

On 6/11/2025 at 3:52 PM, Tripredacus said:

This looks to be the same PDF that I downloaded (pdf page 13 and 42)

http://oldschooldaw.com/asus/2006/e3037_p5m2_series.pdf

Yes, I see it now in pag 2-20.
 PCI Express x16 graphic card inserted to the onboard PCI Express x16 slot
may run only at x1 speed (Intel spec.). Make sure the installed PCI Express x16
graphic card support the downgrade x1 speed before you make a purchase.

I don't know what the Intel specification is.
I asked on Google Gemini (I left chatGPT for being a liar) and it says that Intel chipsets of that time only support 1x speed.
I find that strange; I have an Intel Xeon i3000 (Mukilteo-2) (3000 series) (ICH7).
GPU-Z and Aida64 say the speed is 16x; I'll try to run a more in-depth test.

As a curiosity, I'll mention that the video card's bandwidth is 32-bit, and that when connected to Windows 2000-XP, the available RAM in Windows is limited to 2 GiB. While I don't have this limitation in Windows Seven and 10 x64.

Edited 19 hours ago by Cixert

[Tripredacus]

Considering that the Asus PDF is a second revision and from April of 2006, it would be before PCI-E 2.0 would actually be available
Gemini says that there is no Intel Specification named as such, but is likely refering to an Intel implementation guide and chipset-specific capabilities document in relation to the PCI-SIG specification.

So they may be referring to a document like this, which is very difficult to read if you ask me:
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/datasheet/i-o-controller-hub-7-datasheet.pdf
But there are some bits such as "Ports 1-4 can be statically configured as 4x1, or 1x4". 

Here you can build off this if you want: https://g.co/gemini/share/07cb56274eb7
I know working with these LLMs sometimes you can get them going in the wrong direction and they can be less reliable. Maybe I got a good start on that instance. But I have to preface again that these public LLMs are trained on public information and not on in-depth technical subjects like chipsets or hard drives. And because they are trained on public posts, they have also read forum posts or comments from people who may have not quite used the correct answer or an incorrect answer. You've been on MSFN for a long time, so you've seen posts that were inaccurate or wrong. And LLM doesn't know what is true or not and doesn't have the ability to test if anything is true or confirm things. That's why it is never actually helpful when you want it to help in regards to advanced hard disk related things such as trying to get more than 2.2 TB on an MBR disk, LLM think this is actually impossible due to it having read official support statements and the like. So try not to get caught up in the trap that LLMs know everything or are the solution to all of our problems. They are just a powerful tool and until AGI happens, we should treat them as such.