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Dual Monitors
Quadriflax - Apr 12, 2004
  Quadriflax Apr 12, 2004
Here's the situation. My boss wants to hook up two LCD monitors to her Dell machine running WinXP to expand her desktop. Her videocard is just the Intel whatever that's onboard. I've done some looking into it, and it seems as though there are two ways to do it.

1) Get a PCI video card and make sure the settings in BIOS are right etc.

2) Get a dual monitor AGP card and hook up both monitors.

I was thinking Option 2 would probably be easier. I found a cheap card here... but have some concerns since I ran upon this thread.... Specifically the post that says:


  
	
	

		
		

			Beware that some dual-monitor cards are not dual-vga, but rather will support one vga (crt) monitor and one lcd monitor. The way you tell is if the card has two ramdacs it'll support two crts using a dvi-converter on the dvi output. If it has only one ramdac, a dvi-converter on the dvi output will not work.


What does this mean? Will two LCDs work with this card? If not, how can I tell which ones will? Is this guy even making any sense? To me it seems that a monitor is a monitor, at least in the plug-n-play sense. Why would a video card care what type of monitor it is? Would the card I linked work? If not, does anyone know one for a similar price that would? I'm confused...

Thanks all.

 racketboy Apr 12, 2004
I've never heard that one CRT/one LCD thing before.

 it290 Apr 12, 2004
I've never encountered that either, and AFAIK all the modern Nvidia cards are dual -controller. Just make sure at least one of the monitors supports analog input and you'll be good to go. That looks like a good card for this purpose; I highly recommend Nvidia carts over ATi for dual monitor support, as their drivers are much better in this regard.

 ExCyber Apr 12, 2004
Basically what it's saying is that some video cards have only digital output on one of their DVI connectors, and using a DVI->VGA adapter won't work because the analog signal just doesn't exist on that port. As long as at least one of the LCD monitors has a DVI input, you should have no problem (unless it's a braindead design that only accepts DVI-A input, but hopefully nobody was silly enough to do that).

 Quadriflax Apr 13, 2004

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by ExCyber@Apr 12, 2004 @ 09:29 PM



 Basically what it's saying is that some video cards have only digital output on one of their DVI connectors, and using a DVI->VGA adapter won't work because the analog signal just doesn't exist on that port. As long as at least one of the LCD monitors has a DVI input, you should have no problem (unless it's a braindead design that only accepts DVI-A input, but hopefully nobody was silly enough to do that).


Well, now I'm confused again. The card I linked has two standard outputs. I know mine has one standard and one DVI output. Since her monitors are identical, and they work with the onboard videocard from Dell, they should both work on the card I linked, right?

Maybe answering this will help. I have a GF4 Ti4600 card with a standard output and a DVI output. My monitor is currently plugged into the non-DVI port. If I wanted to hook up my other monitor, which is non-DVI, would it work if I used the DVI-to-standard adaptor? I'm using "standard" and non-DVI interchangeably because I have no idea what I'm talking about (obvious?). Clarification would help.

Thanks for all the info so far.

 gameboy900 Apr 13, 2004
Ok here's the thing. If you want to hook up two monitors using regular 15 pin (non-DVI) connections than pretty much any recent (2 years or less) card out there that has two outputs on it will work. You will just need to use the DVI-to-VGA convertor that most come with. IF you want to use both monitors using DVI outputs then you will have trouble finding any card out there that has two of them. Generally speaking modern (or current generation) ATI and NVIDIA cards will support two monitors using VGA (one of them using the convertor of course).