Vid cards....and MoBo's

C

Cabanaboy

New Member
Can I just plop another Video card on my MoBo in an open slot and run a second monitor to it? I have an old monitor and can get an old vid card for dirt cheap, and it would just be for word processing, while the other side would be for gaming etc... is this easy?
 
i dont believe you can, unless you have 2 identicle sli-ready cards and you connect both the cards. or howabout a single card that supports dual monitors?
 
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you can run different cards, I've run AGP ATI and PCI Nvidia and RAGE3d cards together, they just work different.... to get them to show different or continous screens can be interesting and finding two vid cards that don't conflict (share an IRQ or something) can get costly unless you have a bin of old parts like I had. I did this with XP when it first came out, so it can work... is it worth it? prolly not, unless you just need more surface... it can make a mess of older cheap games if the game doesn't follow windows designations for primary adapter......

as far as I know about SLI it allows you to share the processing power of the video cards to come out a little ahead. But it is really real world useful IMO for benchmarking and CAD/ 3d design where you dump alot of process at one time and want to shorten the actual momentary processing time of all the pixels and shaders etc. the downsides of SLI is it splits your x16 to 2x8 PCIE so you have more processing power but less pipes to get it there..

so that being said what I meant was SLI isn't a necessity for splitting your desktop, but might be a good idea if you want to split something with 3d, like windows Vista has supposedly.

ok I'm gonna take a nap
 
I have my Radeon 9200 for the games. What I'm trying to get at was that he was able to move his mouse around all 4 screens, and open up several programs in each screen, so it was like one large desktop. He'd have AIM in one corner, Ghost recon in another, internet in the third, and a music player in the 4th. It was an ordinary Dell and that was 3 years ago. He also was no computer prodigy, but he was a great artist and musician as well.

I just want to run 2 monitors like that, maybe a game in one, and Word in another.
 
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