Dual head video cards

[dgmm]

On Tuesday 17 July 2007, Josh Paetzel wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 July 2007, dgmm wrote:
> > Are there any "gotchas" I should look out for when purchasing a
> > dual head video card?
> >
> > I'm currently looking for a cheap NVidia card with both analogue
> > and digital output to use my old 21" CRT and the new 19" LCD but,
> > as usual, there's very little info other than for Windows in the
> > write ups/reviews.
> >
> > I've never used dual head before so I'm concerned that some cards
> > might share resources to the extent that they are windows only .
> > Maybe I'm seeing potential problems that aren't there?
> >
> > Budget is tight so I don't want to screw up the purchase.  "Cheap"
> > is word I'm looking for :-)
>
> You'll need to use the binary nvidia drivers, the open source nv
> driver doesn't support dual-head at all.  So you run in to a couple
> of gotchas there.  The first being that the nvidia drivers are i386
> only, they aren't available for AMD64, and the second is that
> twinview has a sort of odd behavior when you use different
> resolutions on each monitor.  It's hard to describe but the driver
> basically pretends that the resolutions are the same and then only
> draws what can be displayed of the smaller one, so there's desktop
> outside of the monitor that you can drag windows in to but obviously
> can't see.
>
> With regards to cards I've used the recent nvidia drivers and
> dual-head with everything from an fx5500 PCI card to 6200LE to 6600GT
> to 7200 cards.  I've used the legacy drivers with various 4x00ti
> cards.
>
> Here are links to cards I've personally used with dual head in the sub
> $50 range USD.
>
> pci-e
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121080
>
> agp
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127290

Thanks both to you and to Yuri for the quick and useful replies.  Not having 
looked at dual head before I was unaware that the open source driver didn't 
do it.  I'm sure I'd have found out eventually but you guys have saved me 
some head scratching time ;-)

Screen res will be 1280x1024 on both and I'm using an i386 system.

I'll probably end up with either a 6200 or maybe a 7600 if the budget will 
stretch.

Thanks again.

-- 
Dave