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I'm just staying away from the 780G because it seems to have a few problems with hard drives which could be overcome, but I'm not willing to spend the time on it.

Will there be any problems once I add a ATi card, though? I have no experience with onboard and discrete graphics in the same system, especially if they're from different vendors.

I have an Asus P5N-D which has an Nvidia chipset, and am running a Radeon HD 4850 with no problems whatsoever. The motherboard works fine, but it had compatibility issues with my RAM (fixed with a BIOS update). The graphics card absolutely rocks.

edit: oops! I didn't realize that you were talking about running discrete and onboard. I think that it would work just fine. At most you'd have to change a BIOS setting or two. Years back I ran a system with intel integrated graphics and an nVidia graphics card, and that worked just fine.

I had an incompatibility with my NForce4 Ultra motherboard and my Radeon HD3870X2. The same board worked fine with a Radeon X1950Pro and a Radeon X800XL, so I believe it's the dual-GPU nature of the card that is incompatible with the NVidia NForce4 chipset.

I've never heard of such issues with 780G, which ones are you talking about?

Using a nVidia chipset for avoiding issues is kind of laughable considering their rather poor history in this regard (they've always performed well but ALL of their chipsets have had some issues except for potentially the most recent). Anyway, just disable the onboard graphics and you should be good to go.

Skrying wrote:

I've never heard of such issues with 780G, which ones are you talking about?

Using a nVidia chipset for avoiding issues is kind of laughable considering their rather poor history in this regard (they've always performed well but ALL of their chipsets have had some issues except for potentially the most recent). Anyway, just disable the onboard graphics and you should be good to go.

What he said; I believe, and someone more knowledgeable can confirm, that you cannot have two different graphics card drivers installed on a Vista system. Thus if the onboard is of a different vendor or requires a different driver then you must disable it to use the discrete card.

As far as Nvidia chipsets go, I've sworn off of them. I owned an Nforce 3 board that had some issues before my previous 680i; after moving to P45 I don't think I'll ever go back. Intel chipsets just work too well, and the newer AMD/ATi chipsets for AMD boards are stellar.

Airmantharp wrote:

What he said; I believe, and someone more knowledgeable can confirm, that you cannot have two different graphics card drivers installed on a Vista system. Thus if the onboard is of a different vendor or requires a different driver then you must disable it to use the discrete card.

I'm not sure if this is true. I don't know about running multiple drivers, but I do know that I've run multiple cards from different manufacturers before. (i.e. good AGP card for main and cheap PCI card for secondary)

alloyD wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

What he said; I believe, and someone more knowledgeable can confirm, that you cannot have two different graphics card drivers installed on a Vista system. Thus if the onboard is of a different vendor or requires a different driver then you must disable it to use the discrete card.

I'm not sure if this is true. I don't know about running multiple drivers, but I do know that I've run multiple cards from different manufacturers before. (i.e. good AGP card for main and cheap PCI card for secondary)

Referring to Vista here though, specific to Vista's new driver model.

Airmantharp wrote:

alloyD wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

What he said; I believe, and someone more knowledgeable can confirm, that you cannot have two different graphics card drivers installed on a Vista system. Thus if the onboard is of a different vendor or requires a different driver then you must disable it to use the discrete card.

I'm not sure if this is true. I don't know about running multiple drivers, but I do know that I've run multiple cards from different manufacturers before. (i.e. good AGP card for main and cheap PCI card for secondary)

Referring to Vista here though, specific to Vista's new driver model.

Correct.

ok, I haven't actually done any of that since I started using Vista. Good to know.