[DanL]

Alright, thanks for all the help, guys.

So heres what I've done. Like I said, my cisco teacher was throwing out several oldskewl computers, so I grabbed several '96 video cards. Anyways, so now I had three cards - the Quadro (AGP), the TNT (PCI), and the generic Trident card(PCI).

I put each into the computer by itself. By itself, each card worked fine.

I put the Quadro and TNT in. The Quadro worked, but the TNT got the error message. I took the TNT out and put Mr. Generic in. The Quadro worked but Mr. Generic didn't.

Then I took the Quadro out and put the TNT and Mr. Generic in. The TNT worked but Mr. Generic got the error message. When I switched slots, Mr. Generic worked but the TNT got the error message. Most likely what happens here is that the AGP slot is checked for a video card first, then the PCI slots in a specific order.

I doubt this is a Windows thing, because if it was, the card would display the BIOS screen and then stop - which doesn't happen. As for the IRQ's, when the card has the cannot start message, it isn't even assigned an IRQ (back in the day, my video card got to share the IRQ with my nic.... you have no idea how long and how many black-screen-with-green-hashes-which-is-b.o.s.-equivalent-of-video-card-crash crashes I went through before I learned the problem was the IRQ).

So, basically, the cards work fine by themselves. The problem therefore must be specific only to the case where two are put in at the same time. Since the card which is recognized first works fine, the problem applies always to the secondary card. So I'm led to believe in Nate's explination. Nate - do you have any more information about this issue? Like is it specifically the motherboard, or the card, or both? Would the instruction manual contain information about this? Do cards specifically say somewhere that their bios doesn't need to be initialized for the card to work? How can I make sure this is the problem?

Thanks for your help, everyone!