If there was a Dualhead Add-In Card retailing for $30, would you buy one?

[Sephiroth_IX]

You have two monitors. You are using a performance video card, thus no dualhead. If Matrox (or anyone) came out with a dual head PCI passthrough card for $29.95, would you snap one up?

 

[LXi]

Yep, that would substitude the need for the second video card.

 

[chuckieland]

that depend on
I have seem those duel head adaptor before
I have email 3dfx about those. they say that for duel head it probly two thing happen,
1) two monitor show the same thing,(i don't think that is what everyone have in mind for duel monitor setup)
2) there mind not be enough power from video card to monitor.
those are the answer i got from 3dfx.
but they are not sure, they are guess this would happen.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Why not just get a second video card for roughly that price?

The only dual-display systems I've had involve two video adapters. This functionality has been around since Win98. You can't do special stuff (gaming, DVD, DirectX, etc.) on the second display anyway.

Don't be fooled by TwinView from nVidia or Matrox's DualHead. These guys (mostly Matrox), are circumventing the natural multiple-display capabilities already included in Windows.

-SUO

 

[NaughtyusMaximus]

To get dual-displays on my system, I spent $8 on an S3 card. It works wonderfully.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The advantages of using a single card with dualhead/twinview are that you don't use up another IRQ and PCI slot, and of course that's one less chip producing heat, and fewer drivers having to be loaded and fewer incompatibilities from trying to use two brands of video card.

However getting the Matrox DualHead to work properly was impossible for me (couldn't get the second monitor above 60Hz no matter what), I finally gave up and went back to using my TNT2 AGP and a Velocity128 PCI for the secondary display (until I needed the monitor for something else).

Of course the true solution is to have an entire second computer running, cracking RC5 and running whatever messaging clients you like, so your main system can do nothing but game (and crack RC5).

Once I get a good digital KVM switch I'm going to have two or 3 secondary systems running in my room (not using a cheap switch since I would like a resolution and refresh rate that doesn't actively burn away my corneas).

Oh yeah, no I wouldn't buy an add-in card. If you get an addin card that doesn't have its own processing unit and RAMDAC and stuff, then you're offloading that to your main card. If it does have those, then it's not 30 bucks.