On 3/29/2013 7:00 AM, Alfred von Campe wrote: > Everything I've googled lead me to believe this wasn't possible. I did > stumble across an interesting setting in the BIOS yesterday (which I > cannot find today) that implied something along these lines, but it > stated that it should only be used for Windows 7 and would have no > effect on other operation systems. > > When I plug in a monitor to the on-board VGA output and the PIC video > card, the BIOS won't let the system boot. I will try the hot-plug > trick to see if it works for me. linux, or rather, X, may not be able to cope, but the fact that windows *can* cope with it implies the hardware is certainly capable. I *know* with the early (and really lousy performance) intel onboard stuff, you flat couldn't use the onboard if an external card was plugged into the AGP slot. I suspect this only works on the newest intel stuff, where the video controller is built into the CPU chip, that would be the 'sandy bridge' and 'ivy bridge' architecture Core i3/i5/i7 chips. I might also add, the HD4000 in some of the better Ivy Bridge chips performs quite well, its about half as fast as the low-to-midrange Nvidia GT640 as measured by framerate during various 3D drawing benchmarks. Certainly not going to satisfy a gamer, but for my purposes (Google Earth, Stellarium, etc), its fine. I got the GT640 because I needed dual DVI and my motherboard only had DVI+VGA -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast