I want to go Quad monitor

[toolboxolio]

So I currently have a 7800gt (eVGA) that runs my two LCD's with no problems with extended desktop. One has 1440x900 native res and the extended has 1280x1024. Both run at native no prob.

I am strongly considering going quad but don't want to dish out the money for another high-end graphics card. I saw this card for $28 shipped and it supports dual dvi.

Anybody have success with running a PCI Express card with two monitors coupled with a regular old PCI card with dual monitors?

Am I setting up for disappointment?

Thanks for any help in advance.


edit: Running WinXP Pro w/sp2

 

[Matthias99]

Should work fine. Occasionally people have reported issues getting NVIDIA and ATI drivers to play nice, but AFAIK NVIDIA + Matrox and ATI + Matrox (as well as Matrox + Matrox) work OK.

You could also get an older NVIDIA PCI video card that has dual monitor outputs.

 

[toolboxolio]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
Should work fine. Occasionally people have reported issues getting NVIDIA and ATI drivers to play nice, but AFAIK NVIDIA + Matrox and ATI + Matrox (as well as Matrox + Matrox) work OK.

You could also get an older NVIDIA PCI video card that has dual monitor outputs.

I didn't see any NVIDIA dual dvi that were this cheap. I also remember the Matrox G200 being pretty solid back in the day.

If you know of anything in the same price range from Nvidia, I would like to go that route. Searched pricegrabber and eBay. The G200 was the cheapest card that meets my dual DVI need.

 

[aka1nas]

I would highly recommend going with the same GPU manufacturer for multiple display setups like that. Heterogenous multi-display can work poorly in XP, and is flat-out disallowed in Vista.

 

[Matt2]

Disregard.

Didnt realize you were looking PCI.

 

[Matthias99]

I didn't see any NVIDIA dual dvi that were this cheap.

Didn't realize you wanted dual DVI on the second card. Yeah, the Matrox is probably your best bet.

Heterogenous multi-display can work poorly in XP

Other than drivers not always playing nice, it works fine in my experience.

and is flat-out disallowed in Vista.

This does appear to be the case. Apparently it works if you have Aero disabled (and apparently Aero runs rather slowly on PCI displays anyway).

This article: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/multimonVista.mspx

makes it sound like you need to use WinXP drivers as well, not the new Vista WDDM drivers.

 

[aka1nas]

Yeah, it has to fall back to the old video driver stack, which kind of sucks even if you don't want to use Aero. This will be a bigger deal when more Vista-optimized apps come out that offload processing to the GPU, as I don't think you will get virtualized video RAM or the GPU task scheduling capability if you are using the old XP graphics stack instead of WDDM.

 

[toolboxolio]

Well I won't be using Vista for a long long long time to come. I will make the switch when gaming gets "better" performance rather than "worse."

Thanks for all the input, all. I feel better about pulling the trigger now.