What's a good secondary PCI vid card?

Justin Meisse · May 2005

I currently have a dual screen setup with my geforce 6800 and I want to add a third, so I'm looking for a PCI video card. I'm looking for something that can handle 3d, I've been noticing alot of games are able to span across screens nowadays.

motives · May 2005

whats your budget?

CheapAlert · May 2005

3dfx Voodoo2 12mb, I recommend Diamond Monster 3D ][

- It handles 3D (not 2d though)
- It's "good" as in it doesn't suck as much as a savage card
- it's 16bit color only with a max of 800x600 res in most cases
- It's built to be only a secondary card
- IT SHOULD BE CHEAP ASS HELL

Kirin · May 2005

There are some PCI Radeon 9000 or 9200's floating around ... might want to look into that.

edit: look here ... comes in 64MB and 128MB flavours

Rwolf · May 2005

I'm currently running a Radeon 9250 PCI 256MB for my secondary. Still pretty slow compared to AGP cards. (and I mean SLOW!!!)

Justin Meisse · May 2005

ATI and nVidia living inside the same computer, scandalous! Looks like I might pick up the Sapphire 9200SE 128MB.

Cheap: heheh, funny you should mention that, I have that sitting in my parts box.

oXYnary · May 2005

justin. are you sure this is possible?

Rwolf · May 2005

You might be able to also support quad monitors if that 9200 SE supports dual monitors by itself.

I used to run dual monitors w/ my 9250 Radeon and Geforce 2 400mx on my Workstation, untill I needed my monitor back for my Gaming PC. So I took out the Geforce. (there were some minor issues when setting either the Radeon or Geforce as the primary display)

mr.toast · May 2005

the card i currently use is pretty good, geforce 5200 fx pci, i can use it to run HL2 and CS:S at a decent framerate

Ryno · May 2005

I don't believe that a game can span across screens controlled by two different types of cards. Even if it could, the game could only run at the quality level supported by the lowest-end card in the connection. This would probably end up being a resolution of 1024 x 384, with a very poor framerate. And the low end card might not even be able to handle many of the current generation games.

You'd have to go for one of the quad-card solutions I think. Also, a word of warning, in that many of these quad-view type of cards are not actually designed for gaming, as they are marketed toward financial analysts and stock traders, who only need to run standard apps. Their gaming performance can be piss poor.

Rwolf · May 2005

I think only good gaming on +3 monitors is to run a SLI or Dual PCI-Express video cards. But thats plenty more $$$ then just slapping in additional PCI video cards for more monitor support.

PaK · May 2005

i had a geforce 4 and an ati radeon 7000 pci gfx card so that I could have 4 monitors!! *rwaar*

My mini case overheated about 3 months later and my power supply blew up :P

-R

What's a good secondary PCI vid card?

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