Looking for a board that can handle two (not crossfired) PCI-x vidoe cards.

[-AUGieDogie-]

Ok so I'm lookin for a new board. I'm going to go with Asus as I am loyal as all can be to them.

I need a board that can handle two PCI-x video cards, in a non cross fire mode. Im going to pick up a 4800 card and want to bump my x1900 down for my second monitor. The problem I find is that when the secondary slot (at least on my P5W-DH) is occupide (sp?) the primary automatically drops to 8x speed. Not cool.

I look at both the p5q series and the rampage II formula manuals but they don't really shed much light on the things.

What I want is for the 4800 card to run at 16x and the 1900 can run at 8,4,or what ever. Its just going to handle my second monitor in windows and will just handle secondary functions during gaming. Coretemp, speedfan, those type of things that i like to monitor. I know I can use the 4800 to do both monitors but i cant help thinking that it is just not working as fast as it can having to redraw both, instead of just the primary monitor.

Does this make sense?

[TI66ER]

You could use a p5q-e,with the main card in the top slot at 16x and the other card in the bottom slot at times 4.The board will do xfire at 8x/8x but if the second card is in the bottom(third) slot,the top slot should stay at 16x whilst the bottom one will be 4x.

[YMAA]

PCI-X != PCI-Express. PCI-X is used mostly for RAID cards and found on workstation & server boards.

Anyway, any board with two PCIe slots can do two video cards that aren't in Crossfire or SLI. Just don't connect the bridges between the cards and tell the driver control panel not to enable the dual graphics mode.

[-AUGieDogie-]

I only used the pci-x for the generic pci express term, sorry for the confusion.

And no not any board with 2 PCIe slots will work. My P5W-DH, automaticly nocks the primary slot to 8x as soon as you plug in a second PCIe video card.
the p5q manul doesn't really give enough info, neither does the rampage formula.

[zanzabar]

the rampage is 16x16 the p5q deluxe is 16x8x4, u just dont select sli or xfire in the options

the only board that would give problems are some older NV chipsets that only use the 2nd slot for sli

[-AUGieDogie-]

So a p5q deluxe will run my (for now) x1900 @16x and my x850 @8? To be honest this is WAY overkill for my 850, i just want the primary to stay at 16.