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Hope someone can help.

I needed more graphics card ports because I want 4 screens. My main GPU is a Nvidia GTX 1650 Super I recently purchased a cheap second GPU (Nvidia GT710) thinking I can just stick it on my motherboard and all will be sweet. (Sounds like I made a mistake here). I am not expecting anything flash from the GT710 (Just watching Youtube and Excel etc.)

Here's the problem: Firstly, when I booted , the second card didn't pick up a screen so I messed with the drivers and downloaded the driver for the GT710. This looks like it's a very old driver (2020) or something. Now all screens started working but the same 2020 driver was also applied to my GTX 1650 Super which made it really slow and can't play games or antyhing on it anymore. Whenever I try to install a newer driver, the GT710 just stops working completely.

I've tried different things like Manually installing the driver for each card but Windows just takes that driver and applies to both cards.

I'm wondering if there's a way to hard force the driver to use in the registry ? anyone ever tried that? From what I'm reading, peeople say it's a Nvidia problem and I should probably have bought a AMD card for my second GPU.

Any advice?

KiwiFox
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2 Answers2

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I can confirm you can run graphics outputs with two different drivers on windows 10 and better - I am currently running one display with an onboard intel adaptor, and an nvidia RTX3080 for 2 others.

You didn't mention what your system was but a lot of modern CPUs have competent enough GPUs built in for these purposes. This wasn't included in the question, but might be an avenue worth looking at.

The problem in your case is two fold - they both use the same driver, and as you noticed, driver support got dropped around 2020 for the GT710. If you'd had a more modern Nvidia GPU with modern support, or any other GPU, chances are it'd work. You can't run 'different' versions of the same driver, and as you've noticed, the 'older' driver isn't as good as a new one.

In theory, and I've not tested this, you could use a GPO to prevent driver installation for a specific device but you're going to need the nvidia drivers for the newer GPU anyway.

As such I don't think there's a way to drop down a single adaptor to the 'basic display drivers' windows uses as a fallback either or to pin a specific driver for a specific device.

Also a year on since this question was asked you might have better options than the 710

Journeyman Geek
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This procedure might work to have two different drivers to two different Nvidia cards:

  • Block updates to the GT710 as described in this answer.
  • Install manually the 2020 driver. This will change the driver for both cards (hopefully only for the moment). You might need to execute these two points in reverse order (but do not boot in-between).
  • Let Windows now update the driver for the GTX 1650. Several boots might be required.

If this works, you're going to have two different drivers for the two Nvidia cards. If it doesn't work, then Windows might not support having two different drivers for this setup. (I can't unfortunately test this on my computer.)

harrymc
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