Video Card for Dual Monitors (22" and 32" LCD)

[goat]

I am building a system for my brother.

He wants to be able to open around 12-15 Internet Explorer windows, so he is going to add a 32" LCD to his system which already includes a 22" LCD.

I was thinking about using a single ASUS Radeon 3850 with 512 GDDR3.

Will this be enough to both displays, or should I go with two less expensive cards in Crossfire?

I am not against using Nvidia cards either, just looking to spend a little less $$$.

He probably will not be playing any games on the system.

Thanks for the input.

 

[Unknown Person]

Really in my experience if you aren't running 3D graphics, then most modern video cards will handle two large resolutions well. I'm running a dual monitor config with dozens of windows up with a 7600GT, which is handling them all fine. I'm not quite sure if the same is true in CrossFire, but in SLI, the second card's video output become useless. Multiple GPUs in CrossFire/SLI only improve 3D graphic performance.

 

[Billb2]

A couple of 4meg PCI cards will do that ...on a PentiumII setup. That's all 2D graphics.

And if you stop and think about it, dual monitor CF/SLI is kind of a less than useless concept.

 

[lopri]

I would have Windows DreamScene running in the background, two VM windows, and probably a few Word/Excel windows, Firefox, and usually 4~5 explorer windows open, then watched a Blu-Ray movie on a bottom-right coner of the desktop and at the same time played Oblivion @1280x800 in window mode on upper-left coner. (It did get choppy at times but never crashed.) All this on a HD 3850. Your brother should be fine.

 

[goat]

Cool.

I wasn't sure, with the 32" being run at a higher resolution, if it would need both of the DVI outs from the video card. I thought I might need a second card for the 22".

Thanks for the replies. :thumbsup: