Best card/brand for 2D multi-mon?

[SoulAssassin]

Boss said I could grab a 2nd monitor the other day and I'm looking for a video card that has the best multi-mon support for 2D apps. I remember back in the day Matrox had better support than what Windows did natively. The taskbar would stretch from one monitor to the other and things just worked more like they should. Looking to run 1280x1024 on each monitor and unfortunately it has to be VGA connections, no DVI on the LCD. 3d performance is irrelevent. PC has one PCIe 1x and 2 low profile PCI slots....HP DC5700.

Anyone recommend a card or at least ATI vs Nvidia vs whoever?

 

[postmortemIA]

nvidia can extend taskbar to both screens, pretty much treats it as a single 2560x1024 monitor.

as for dvi vs vga, doesn't matter, dvi cards come with dvi to vga adapters.

 

[Arkaign]

Matrox used FTW 🙂

These have phenomenal image quality, and can be found often for $70 or less :

http://cgi.ebay.com/Matrox-Mil...ameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem

 

[SoulAssassin]

any reason this wouldn't work?

http://cgi.ebay.com/Matrox-Mil...VWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem


edit: looking at the other auctions for these, the bid will probably go up higher than I want...cheaper the better.

 

[SoulAssassin]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814139010

So far it looks like this is the best bet...I can't find any PCIe 1x cards in a decent price range with dual monitor support which leaves me with low profile PCI which has a pretty small selection as well. If anyone has any better suggestions or feedback on this card let me know. The lowest price card from Matrox would have been the G550 which goes for around $130-150 still.

 

[HannibalX]

Originally posted by: SoulAssassin
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814139010

So far it looks like this is the best bet...I can't find any PCIe 1x cards in a decent price range with dual monitor support which leaves me with low profile PCI which has a pretty small selection as well. If anyone has any better suggestions or feedback on this card let me know. The lowest price card from Matrox would have been the G550 which goes for around $130-150 still.

For an office workstation that looks like a solid choice. It being PCI really isn't a big deal since you are only going to be doing 2d work.