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Dual Video Cards

post #1 of 5
7/26/04 at 9:15pm
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I have been considering running dual monitors on a computer I am currently building, yet I don't want to spend the high prices for some of the dual display video cards. I think I saw somewhere that you can just use two different video cards in the same PC and that may be a lot cheaper. If this is so, then if I ran a game would it only use one of the video cards or would it combine both or what? I am guessing it would only use one of the cards (whichever is for the main monitor) yet am not sure.

One thing I was considernig was getting a video card with a TV-tuner built in so that I will also have that part covered.
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post #2 of 5
7/27/04 at 5:44am
If by dual output you mean DVI and VGA, that is pretty standard and all you need is the adapter(DVI->VGA) that comes with the graphics cards.
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post #3 of 5
7/27/04 at 8:46am
Most PCI motherboards do not have a second AGP slot. While I believe there are non-AGP PCI video cards, they are not going to be very high performance, that's why they added the AGP slots in the first place.

In any case, a new card with dual output (either DVI or VGA or DVI/VGA) will most likely be less expensive than getting two cards, assuming either you did have a board that had two AGP slots or you could find a decent non-AGP PCI video card.

If you are getting a new PCIe board, you could plug in two video cards, provided the board had enough PCIe lanes, ie - at least 28 total (16 + 8 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1). But if you are getting a new PCIe board, then I'd be questioning your lack of funds for the better video card with dual output.
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post #4 of 5
7/28/04 at 6:58pm
If you are ONLY looking for duel display and you are not worried about high performance graphics/gaming cards... you could also look into the MATROX series at Matrox.com

I run a G400 Duel Display on my video editing PC and it has worked perfectly for me... there is also a G550 that is relatively inexpensive... they both have 2 VGA outputs…
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post #5 of 5
7/28/04 at 7:02pm
Even if you want performance you could get a nice AGP card and a cheaper PCI card and run the two together becuase games will only run on the main card which is AGP so you will not have a performance bottleneck.
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