Radeon 9800 Pro vs (9800 Pro + 9200 SE PCI)?

[Pokey007]

Hello AnandTech!

My computer has recently died on me and while upgrading I ordered an Radeon 9200 SE PCI from newegg to replace one that had fried, thinking my AGP one still worked. The day after I ordered it, my AGP card, an old Geforce3 died. Needing at least one video card, I went out and bought a Radeon 9800 Pro. The Pro has two output cards and I've been using it for mostly webdesign and cad work. For gaming I only use one monitor.

The 9200 SE arrived today and now I'm stuck with a dilema: Is it better to have the 9200 SE seperatly for solely 2D work and some 3D modeling? Or should I just stick with the 9800 Pro to run both monitors?

Thanks.

Pokey

 

[Pokey007]

anybody?

 

[crimson117]

9800 pro for both. It will not suffer driving two monitors.

 

[Dman877]

I used to have a dual monitor setup and I tried it both ways. My experiences were as follows. With 2 cards (AGP and PCI) driving different monitors, most games work but some will default to the slower card for some reason, most notebaly, CoD and there was no fix I could find. Suffice to say running CoD on my pci 7000 didn't work. Running both monitors off one card worked rather well but when you game, it uses the primary monitor and the other monitor is sort of off limits until you exit the game. What I mean is my tv window wouldn't display and I couldn't surf the web or anything on the secondary monitor while playing a game, not even with alt-tab. With 2 cards everything worked normally on the second monitor.

FYI, I tried essentially the same thing with nvidia cards and it turned out the same. I eventually gave up and just built a 2d-only box. It's just a lot easier for me.