has anyone gotten 2 nVidia cards to work in Ubuntu? (trying 790GX + 2x 9400GT)

[JavaGeek_Boston]

Hello All,
Has anyone gotten 2 nVidia cards to work in Linux? I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 Januty Jackalope 64-bit with dual monitors. I've installed both cards, but Linux only recognizes one. Is there a trick to enabling the second card? I'm not using SLI. I just want to run a monitor on each card.

I wanted to build the "perfect" development workstation for writing Java code, checking e-mail, running server software, etc. I have a 1600x1200 monitor on the left and a 1920x1200 monitor on the right. 2D performance is pretty sluggish, so I tried buying 2 graphics cards instead of having 1 older video game card. I am running a Phenom 2 955 on a 790GX motherboard.

I originally tried running the 790GX integrated graphics and a Radeon 3450 card (they work together in Hybrid Crossfire in Windows), but had lots of issues with their driver with dual monitors (let alone dual GPU) and went back to nVidia as it's what I've been using on Linux for the last 10 years.

I have dual monitors working with one graphics card. I put a second one in and am trying to see a reference to it in the nVidia X Server Settings panel.

Has anyone ran 2x 9400 GTs before?
Has anyone run 2x nVidia cards before?
Can this configuration work?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Steven

[Kano]

Did you try nvidia-settings to enable more displays?

[GneXteR]

hmm

Does your mainboard have a nforce chipset with SLI support?

[JavaGeek_Boston]

Did you try nvidia-settings to enable more displays?

Hello Kano, thanks for responding. Yes, I looked in nvidia-settings and only saw one GPU.

[JavaGeek_Boston]

Does your mainboard have a nforce chipset with SLI support?

Hello GneXteR, thanks for responding. The 790GX supports crossfire and has 2 PCIe 2.0 slots, but doesn't support SLI.

I assumed it wasn't a requirement as I'm not trying to get SLI working, I just wanted to run each monitor on a separate 2D accelerator.

On a related note, I tried installing Windows XP (on another hard drive) this morning and didn't notice any explicit reference to the 2nd graphics card. I've never tried using 2 cards before, so I don't know what I am looking for. I don't even know my way around the windows client very well.

The 9400GT doesn't have SLI connectors. I assumed it didn't matter, but am starting to wonder.

Thanks,
Steven

[Kano]

Why do you need 2 gfx cards for only 2 monitors?

[JavaGeek_Boston]

Why do you need 2 gfx cards for only 2 monitors?

It's not a necessity, but I am hoping it will make my machine more responsive at high resolutions by splitting the load across 2 2D accelerators.

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17763

I spend a lot of time writing code in Linux and anything I can do to reduce delays makes my day much less frustrating and enables CPU cycles for other tasks.