Help with choosing video card for dual head machine

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Buzz · Post by **Buzz** » Tue Mar 30, 2004 1:09 pm

My motherboard went belly up and I am using this as an excuse to upgrade my machine.

Everything is going ok, but I am having some problem deciding about video cards. I run two 19 inch monitors at 1600x1200 each. I have experienced problems with sound and the pci bus in the past. I used two nvidia cards before (one pci and one agp). I am hoping during the upgrade that I'll only need one card.

I am currently looking at the following two cards:

CHAINTECH FX5900XT 128MB DDR W/TV.DVI
GAINWARD FX5700TDX 256MB 8X AGP DDR W TV/DVI

I have two questions:

1) Are these nvidia cards going to be able to provide me with support for two monitors (not cloned) using the existing vga plugin and the dvi to vga plugin?

2) In all the benchmarks I see, the 5900 beats the socks off the 5700, but what about the difference between 128megs and 256 megs working on dual monitors? Am I going to see performance issues related to that?

Thanks for any help/advice. I can't spend much more than this. My video card budget is around $150. Any other recommendations? (I also play games heh)

thanks,

Buzz

Malakin · Post by **Malakin** » Tue Mar 30, 2004 9:33 pm

Either of those cards are total overkill if you just want decent dual monitor support, an FX5200 would do that just fine. Just make sure whatever card you get comes with a dvi->vga adaptor if you need one, they're usually way overpriced when sold separately.

The ammount of memory used to drive one 2d display isn't much, 16MB is usually plenty. The only time the extra memory makes any difference is 3d gaming and you can only run one 3d game at a time with decent performance so 128MB is fine.

Buzz · Post by **Buzz** » Fri Apr 09, 2004 5:34 am

Malakin wrote:Either of those cards are total overkill if you just want decent dual monitor support, an FX5200 would do that just fine. Just make sure whatever card you get comes with a dvi->vga adaptor if you need one, they're usually way overpriced when sold separately.

Thank you for the suggestions. I did buy the FX5700 and it is working great using twinview. I wasn't aware I would be able to get opengl working on both monitors at once (ie screensavers, quake3) and so it was a nice surprise.

Thanks again,

Buzz