In order to use WDDM drivers in Vista (and thus get Aero), all video adapters must use the exact same video driver. It's possible to get around this, but it's work that's not for the timid, and you end with without Aero.

I have a T60p. This means that when I boot Vista (Vista 64 in my case) any card in my Advanced Dock must be use the v5200 driver. There is a v5200 card on NewEgg, but it's $400 and I haven't put money down for it yet.

I tried a Sapphire X1650 XTcard but it didn't work. I was hoping that I could use X1600 drivers for both the v5200 (which is based on the X1600) and X1650 card. No luck.

Has anyone had success with a video card in the Advanced Dock under Vista?

RonX, I am very interested in getting Vista working on my setup of T60p with Advanced Dock, and I don't care about Aero - in fact, I want to work with the old XP theme running. What is the workaround to get this working? I have tried and cannot get both internal LCD and two external monitors on the Lenovo X1300 (only offically supported card) in the Dock. Either internal screen or external, not both. I also have an nVidia 7600 card I could put in instead. What do I need to do to get this working? I don't mind mucking about with it extensively. Thanks!

No reply as yet.. I now understand better the difference between the driver models used by Vista and XP (WDDM versus XPDM) and the reason why MS decided to eliminate heterogenous graphics adapters in Vista (though it was a CHOICE, they didn't have to do it), and it seems the workaround must involve installing XP drivers in Vista, to get the setup working with two different graphics cards. I tried that, and Vista hung on starting, so obviously didn't like the drivers. What next to do?

By the way, I have found some good discussion of this on the 'net, but am interested to see that Thinkpad owners haven't been discussing this much... and I'm sort of interested why not. Seems to me that many Thinkpad owners are also Dock owners and want to get an external graphics card working in the Dock - there's plenty of discussion about external adapters in the Dock in the forums for older XP setups, but hardly anything about the issue of doing it under Vista.... hmmmm, why not?

At some point, I'll post instructions for getting non-WDDM drivers to work in Vista to support heterogenous display adapters. But right now, I'm still figuring out which cards work in the Advanced Dock with Vista.

As for the small amount of discussion on this topic... sometimes when you do things that are out there on the edge, you find yourself alone.

so what are some general rules to use when picking a video card for the advanced dock?

is there an advantage to getting an extension cable for the lane and using a bigger card?

How about this one? It's at $99 right now (though surely will go up yet) ...
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0131286480

yes - I'm the high bidder on that card right now. Please don't bid against me!

Not me -- it's yours (I hope)!

Ron, did you win that card? I see it went for less than half the price of the Newegg one - good score if you won it. And if you did (or are anyways going to install that card) please post your experiences with it here. I decided to forego using the LCD monitor for now and have Vista installed with an Nvidia 7600 GS in the advanced dock, and I'm pleased to report that it's going very well so far with two 24" external monitors. My system score is almost identical to what it was when I had Vista installed on the Thinkpad alone without being docked - score of 4.3 for the "Graphics" score and 4.2 for the "Gaming graphics" (the lowest score on my system) which I think is pretty good considering the Expresscard slot is only 1x. I assumed the graphics score would go down once I started using a graphics card in the external dock (because of the bandwidth issues), but no - it stayed the same. Hooray!

Until recently I thought that the 7600GS card was about the best card you could get for the Advanced Dock but I guess the FireGL is at least as powerful?

Another bonus of the Nvidia card by the way is that card is passively cooled and with both the Advanced Dock fans disabled I now have a completely silent system (though the card does get rather hot).

Dock has a 55 watt limit on output for cards...

Looks like Ron lost that auction.

Yup - I lost that card. Still working on getting another...

any updates? i am about to buy a t61 and was going to buy the advanced dock and a graphics card from newegg to power 3 19 inch lcds for school work. So is this possible with vista? I was hoping i could get a cheap card(something like $50-75) to work.

atyrrrell, the only card that COULD work with Vista and 3 or more monitors (2-3 external plus the Thinkpad's LCD) is the ATI V5200 which Ron and others have been talking about (see postings). It's not cheap though, more like $400-500 retail ($400 from Newegg) and maybe $160-180 on eBay if you're lucky.

If you want to just go with the external monitors from only the Dock (no Thinkpad LCD and no monitor run from the Thinkpad's own video out) you're less limited on the cards but you'll only get 2 monitors max.

I have tried the 7600 GS from NVidia (the slightly overclocked model from BFG) and had mixed results from it. The performance was good - I had 4.3 graphics score on Vista (4.2 for gaming) which is about the same as the T60p's own graphics score, but the Nvidia Vista drivers are not up to scratch yet. They seemed to introduce some instability into the system (I had occasional win32k.sys blue screens on boot though I can't be 100% sure it was the video drivers, and some other problems, including a total lack of being able to mirror video to a TV, which has been documented on the 'net as a feature that Nvidia has removed from Vista drivers) and I have now gone back to the "official" Lenovo X1300 card (the only one officially supported by Lenovo in the Dock as it's a low power card). I am hoping there will be less instabilities (ATI's drivers for Vista are better), and I CAN mirror the video to TV-out, but the performance is a bit weaker - I get 3.1 for the Vista system score on graphics, and 3.5 for gaming graphics. Whether this will make any difference on a workaday basis, I don't know.

The V5200 should fix those performance issues and all the other issues as well, but at a price. And I am concerned that with that high-performance card, the fan will be noisy. Does anyone know if it has a loud fan?

wow i really didnt think the possibilities were so slim. I was really hoping to run 3 19's but i just dont have the budget for a 400 dollar card.

It really seems like quite the step backwards for vista on this one.

Microsoft has a page about multi-monitor support and Vista here. They offer a sort-of explanation as to why they have introduced this restriction with Vista.

In theory you could use non-WDDM drivers but I don't know if it will really work in practice (see Ron's comments about this above - at best you'd have no Aero interface, as he says).

Also see this ArsTechnica posting for some more explanation.

Now, that's what you need for the T60p with the FireGL V5250.

If atyrrell is planning to buy a T61 with the Nvidia GPU, s/he needs to locate a graphics card that uses a compatible Nvidia chipset and thus can work with the same driver. Those might be less -- or more! -- expensive than the ATI V5200, but the only way to answer that is to figure out the candidate cards first.

Good point, thank you tomh009, I missed that.

Since NVidia has a "unified driver model", that should increase the range of cards which will work concurrently with the T61, right?

I think that ís correct. But I have no personal experience with Nvidia drivers so I can't offer much in terms of concrete advice ...

I would be mor then willing to lose aero if i could use 3 monitors. So your saying i have abetter shot of finding one that works havaing an nvidia card? So I am basically looking for an ati pci x1 card that is under 50 watts power? Then after that its just trial and error? Has anyone experimented with a t61?

I now have an external ATI V5200 card in the advanced dock with my T60p and Vista (I got it from Amazon so I could return it if things work out - you don't have that option with Newegg and this particular card). I haven't yet got it to drive the internal display concurrently with the external monitors (am still working on this - on external boot I don't see the internal card, and on internal boot I get blue screen or a blank screen) but have the following observations:

This is a high-powered card. Internal clocks are 587 (core) and 688 (mem). I don't know what it will do to the Vista System Scores (but it should be higher than the internal scores) because my Vista System Score seems to be broken (though Aero is running).

The display quality of this card is excellent. I had the Lenovo X1300 and was never really happy with this card because the colors were washed out and the display lacked vibrancy. The Nvidia 7600 GS was a big improvement, producing a vibrant and rich display with good quality text. This ATI card is even better - very high contrast, rich and vibrant colors, and crisp, clear text. (I am using Sony CRT monitors so these effects may not be the same with an LCD, I don't know). I am very, very happy with this aspect of the card. Reading text (a lot of what I do - and writing text) is a real pleasure. Reading the NYT with their downloadable Reader is wonderful. I would like to keep this card for these reasons alone.

The ATI drivers seem more stable than the NVidia drivers. With the 7600 GS, I would get weird display artifacts - sometimes the display would jump around (for example when right-clicking on the desktop for the first time after a boot), or there would be a lot of random display activity (lines, etc) when starting up before the desktop shows up. In general, the display is running more cleanly and smoothly with the ATI card (this was also true of the X1300, but I didn't like that for other reasons).

However, I do have a problem with sudden and apparently random lock-ups or complete freezes. The mouse stops and then nothing else happens. I have to power-cycle. This was also an issue with the X1300 card (though not the NVidia card, which is passive-cooled) and I think it might be temperature related. For more on this, see next couple of paragraphs.

The fan on this card is noisy when it is running full tilt, or anything above 50%. At 30% or below it is very quiet. The very useful ATI Tool does work with the card, and gives you complete control of the fan. So you can keep your system whisper quiet if you want, but temperatures will go up. I had temperatures as high as 105 when I was playing around with settings. Now I have the temp at around 73, with the fan at 30% - barely audible, not noisy at all, with an ambient temperature of about 26 (Celsius). This is without the card working very hard - a few webpages open, etc. Certainly no 3D. If you run 3D games, etc, you will definitely need to run the fan high and noisy to keep temperatures acceptable. But if you're like me, and mostly have documents open and stuff like that, you can keep this system nice and quiet with reasonable GPU temperatures.

The ATI tool also gives you overclocking possibilities, and you can run both clocks (core and mem) over 1 GHz (!!) on the slider, but I haven't tested any actual overclock settings for stability, etc. You can also underclock, so if performance isn't so much an issue but temperature and/or fan speed is, you could also underclock as a way of keeping the system cool & quiet. (Incidentally, I never tried the ATI Tool with the Lenovo X1300 card, but I do remember I could never get a temperature readout from that card.)

OK, so back to the 'freezing' problem. I think this is connected with overheating. Back when I used the X1300 card, I noticed that when I increased ventilation to the card (it comes with a fan, but apparently running at a fixed and low speed, so that card would get hot) the freezing problem seemed to go away. I have only had one freeze with the V5200 card so far (I only got the card yesterday) and I had been playing around with fan controls and temperatures, very high at some points (100 sustained for some time). At the time of the freeze (and the Vista would freeze half-way through boot until I had left the system for a while - to cool down?) it had been running about 84 degrees for several hours. Perhaps this is too hot as a sustained temperature. So I am going to keep the temperature at around 75 (by increasing the fan speeds slightly) and hopefully I won't see any more freezes - but we'll see.

Incidentally, the NVidia 7600 GS card (slightly overclocked by BFG) I had been using is passive cooled so completely quiet, but would get very hot. Its sustained GPU temperature was around 103 Celsius (this with just open documents on my desktop - no games or 3D stuff!), and I didn't like that because it made that corner of the Advanced Dock hot as well, including the DVD writer which sits right above the card. The card itself seemed not to care about the high temperature - I never got any performance issue (or freeze, ever) that seemed to be temperature related.

(I disabled both fans in the Advanced Dock, so if you don't care about those fans, these temperature issues won't affect you. Incidentally, I have noticed high CPU and hard drive temperatures on the Thinkpad while it is docked, I don't know if others have. If I am running the Thinkpad for a while, docked, the CPU temperatures will go up to around 80 and the HDD temps will sit at around 50 - with ambient temperatures around 26-30. I know these are very high (though still withing design limits). The Thinkpad fan is whisper quiet throughout, and barely seems to be on. Interestingly, reenabling the noisy Dock fan doesn't really seem to change these temperatures much. Right now, after about 30 minutes on a morning boot, ambient temp 26, the CPUs are at 66 and 60 and the HDDS are at 46 and 45. Intel has more or less crippled undervolting so that probably wouldn't help much, though I haven't tried it.)

I now have the V5200 card working with Aero and two external monitors plus the LCD. I don't know if a reinstall of Vista is required (it shouldn't be) but I reinstalled Vista with the Thinkpad T60p in the Dock, and it saw both graphics cards and installed the standard WDDM drivers for them. I extended the desktop onto all the monitors, then installed the latest Catalyst drivers, rebooted, and discovered that only the LCD was working and the external card drivers had a problem (Code 38). I also got a message from Catalyst saying I had an incompatible driver for the current Catalyst version. This is because the standard ATI driver install had installed the mobility drivers on the internal chip. So I did a force install of the regular driver on the internal chip, rebooted, and voila, no error messages and I was able to extend the desktop. Everything is now working great, and two identical video drivers are listed in device manager. Even ATI Tool works though it seemed a bit confused at first by the existence of two cards (or two identical drivers for different chips?)

I did try to use the ATI Mod tool on an earlier install to get both drivers the same and that didn't work. I think a force install of the regular ATI driver on the internal chip is the way to go.

Here's a bonus: the Vista subsystem graphics score is now 5.9 !! (The highest score Vista can currently give.)

noetus - Fantastic work! Your earlier post where to said you could get the v5200 external card working OR the internal v5200, but not both, is exactly what I found with the Sapphire 1650 card. One or the other, but not both - at least with the WDDM drivers.

Can you provide a link to the exact card you bought from Amazon?

I'm assuming that you download the latest Catalyst Control Center drivers from ATI. When you run CCC, do you see any PowerPlay options?

Also, are you getting a different Vista subsystem score depending on whether you have the internal v5200 set as the startup graphics device, or the PCI-Express video card?

edited to correct 7600GS to Sapphire 1650

Thanks Ron!

You mentioned earlier trying the Sapphire X1650 XT with no luck. I wonder if there is still a way of getting that to work? I think Vista needs to use the identical driver with both chips. What method did you use to get the X1600 driver working on the V5200 internal chip? I've read that it's possible but never tried it.

Anyway, to your questions.

Here's the card I bought from Amazon. Interestingly, Newegg has two cards, for almost identical prices - and the only technical difference I could find is that one has 126 bit memory, and the other 256. I checked the model no. of the card Amazon sent me, and it's the 256 bit model. Also, it was sent without any packaging, just in some bubble wrap - it's the OEM model. (Funny that Amazon is selling OEM computer parts - it's from their stock, too, not a related seller). That fits with the Newegg listings - the 256 bit model is listed as OEM, the 128 bit model as retail. The Amazon price is almost $50 more expensive though, so now you know it works, I'd source it elsewhere.

Yeah, I used the latest CCC drivers. Version 2007.0405 1816.30729. Powerplay only shows up when you select the Thinkpad LCD driver on the drop-down menu, but that's to be expected. Are you asking because you want to run the Thinkpad undocked and want to see if Powerplay comes up because I forced the standard, not mobility, drivers? Makes sense. I'm dual-booting so when running mobile using a different version of Windows, so I'm not so worried about this, but it's good to see it's there

As for your last question, I'm pretty sure that if you boot the machine on the external monitors, the internal card won't be seen by Vista. I haven't tried this, though. However, I can say that when I had the previous Vista install and had only the external monitors running, I had the exact same system scores I do now that I have both internal and external running (and booting on internal). I was very surprised by this. I fully expected that when I finally got the setup working, the score would drop down to what I get when using the Thinkpad undocked, i.e. for the internal card alone, since the scoring system seems to adopt a "weakest link" model. It almost seems as if Vista has scored the better external card and completely ignored the internal one. I can confirm that I re-ran the scores again, once I had all the drivers installed and everything working perfectly (with all three monitors running beautifully), and they came out exactly the same - 5.9 for graphics, and 5.2 for gaming graphics. Odd, no?

One final thing, a tip if you are planning to use ATI Tool (which is indispensable for getting the card to run quietly, and also is nice to have the GPU temp in the system tray all the time). I had to disable DEP completely to get the ATI Tool to work correctly. Otherwise I would get an error on startup about not being able to access the graphics kernel. This is not a nice thing to do, but, for me at least, necessary, since I can't tolerate the noisy fan

Thanks for all the great information noetus. I corrected my recent post - I should have said Sapphire 1650 rather than 7600GS. I worked pretty hard getting the 1650 to work with the v5200, but it wouldn't work. I forced it with both on the v5200 driver, both on the stock CCC, and a few other wild efforts, but no joy. I'm wondering if there's something fundamentally different between the FireGL and Radeon cards that makes them incapable of using the same drivers.

I'm glad that the mobility features come alive with the stock (non-OEM CCC drivers that can be downloaded from ATI. You got it right: when docked, I want full speed. While on the road (or airline), I want to stretch the battery, booting the same OS.

By the way, I'm using Vista 64-bit. It was in that environment that I couldn't get the v5200 and x1650 to work together. I don't that 64-bit makes a difference here, but I should mention it anyway.

Under XP, with the 7600GS in the PCI-Express slot, apps running on the 7600 felt slower than the v5200, even though the benchmarks may not indicate a slow adapter. I used the 7600 mostly for "static" use, with graphics-intensive apps on the v5200. With you experience so far with the 5200 card in the dock, does it "feel" any different than the internal v5200?

Now, I'm off to order a 256-bit ATI 5200 card...

I noticed a difference in the 'feel' of the speed with some cards, but it's hard to say with the 7600 myself to be honest. Though definitely not with the external V5200, though I'll be interested to hear of your experience. Do you mean when moving open windows around the desktop, that sort of thing? The speed of windows to refresh when opening, or scrolling through a document?

Do you have problems getting the T60p to suspend properly, by the way? Mine doesn't go into suspend all the way when it is docked (e.g. the fan remains on) and then it won't come out of suspend. I've tried a few different things.

Hi - I have a T61 with the advanced dock using ATI FireMV 2250 to power two 22" DVI Widescreen LCDs. The T61 has the integrated Intel video and I set the bios to start with the pci express card, I am running VISTA.

When I undock the laptop, I cannot get anything to appear on the laptop LCD, I have to restart the system to get the laptop LCD to work, but if I do this and then try to dock the laptop, then I can't get the external monitors to work. Also, it appears that each time I restart the system, it reinstalls whichever hardware it has available (if different from the last config) ... at no point do I find both video cards showing up in the device manager at the same time.

My question is, should I be able to have both video cards show in the device manager? I would think that if I did, then my problem with the display after docking/undocking would not occur. But I guess if both video cards show up, then how does the system know which one to use? I am new to laptops/docking stations ... trying to switch over from having desktops. Any guidance is appreciated!

(1) As far as I know, the Advanced Dock does not support hot/warm undocking/docking when there is a video card in the PCI-e slot. You have to reboot (both on dock and on undock).

(2) To get Vista to see both cards, you have to (a) boot on the internal card/LCD, (b) have identical drivers on both cards. Obviously to have identical drivers you have to have similar or identical hardware. That means matching the internal card with the same model of card in the PCI-e slot. I doubt this can be done with Intel integrated graphics, but I don't really know.

Follow-up:

I'm using a T60p with an Advanced Dock. I got a v5200 card ($200 on ebay), put it in the dock, rebooted and it came up! Then, I installed Catalyst Control Center (from ATI.com).

Interesting behavior: When the primary display is set to the add-in card, the "Desktop Performance for Windows Aero" subscore is 5.9. If I shift the primary display back to the internal v5200, the subscore drops to 4.1.

I've only been running it for a couple of hours, but it's been stable so far.

Does anyone try it with T61 nVidia card? I would like to know the result, and also if it is any good for gaming!

Dock station(200-300$) + Good nVidia card (200-300$) = 400-600$
looks like another laptop to me