Thinkpads Forum

Hi All

I'm sure I've seen a few threads around this over the years but can't seem to find them now.

I have a T61p with the Nvidia 570m graphics chip. My wife has a T61 with the Intel chip. We have an advanced dock with the X1300 PCIe card in the slot, which gives us two DVI ports on the back of the docking station. However, when trying to boot either of the laptops with the X1300 card in the dock, well Windows 8 just won't boot.

Is their a compatibility issue with the X1300 and the T61/T61p? I seem to remember it being because the X1300 is made by ATI and therefore conflicts with the Nvidia/Intel, although I find that hard to believe considering you can run multiple different manufacturer gfx cards in a desktop PC.

At the moment I have taken the X1300 out, and running one monitor from DVI and the other from VGA <spit>, but I'd really prefer it if I could utilise the X1300 and somehow have both monitors on DVI whilst docked. The X1300 has the splitter cable, so in theory can run two monitors on DVI just using that? But then I guess the performance of the X1300 won't be up to the 570m - although to be honest I don't do any gaming on the laptop anyway so that's probably a moot point. Is there a way to "Disable on-board gfx when docked" or anything like that?

Thanks for any tips.

All versions of Windows, except Vista, should be able to run fine with multiple graphic cards from multiple vendors. But the complications and side effects can be numerous.

My opinion, if all you want is a dual monitor setup, just run one off DVI, and one of VGA. It's not nearly as bad as you would make it out to be (unless you want ultra-high resolutions, over WUXGA.

Look for a setting in the BIOS that will prioritize PCI-Express graphics over internal. It may help.

In WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model, adopted since Vista), all video cards on a system must use the same driver. It was sometimes possible to circumvent this on Vista or 7 by using XP drivers, because that uses XPDM instead of WDDM. In Win8, XPDM is no longer supported, therefore the workaround no longer works. In other words, there is no way to use two significantly different video cards simultaneously in Windows 8.

I believe that the limitation is only on Vista (WDDM 1.0). WDDM 1.1 and 1.2 (Win7/Win8) should support multiple drivers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Di ... iver_Model

Thanks for the responses.

So it seems that Windows 8 uses WDDM 1.2, which has all the features of WDDM 1.1 including "Support multiple drivers in a multi-adapter and multi-monitor setup ".

So in theory it should work.

I'm reasonably happy with the current setup of 1 monitor on DVI, the other on VGA, but there is a slight difference in image quality I'm sure.