Graphics Card for my sister :)

[Luis_Dark]

Hola guys, I need your guidance with this

My sister needs a graphics card that can handle 3 monitors at once, nothing fancy... Right uses her computer for homework and movies basically, with 2 monitors to have all those documents open at the same time, but sometimes she has too many documents open at once and now she wants a third monitor... AND she needs a new graphics card, but I don't know what GPU is best for her. Watcha think??? any advice?????

[Nilesjones]

Well if you're going the single GPU route, you're going to want to look at the AMD/ATI series. With Nvidia you're talking 400 or more for 2 video cards to run 3 monitors. And before anyone flames about 580 and 590 running 3 monitors on a single card, he said nothing too fancy lol

For application programs I would definitely suggest a 6770. That's if you're just doing applications and not messing around with gaming. A 6770 will do you fine, but it won't be that great for gaming.

[juneau]

Gotta agree with Niles. AMD is probably the best route for a cheap multi monitor setup these days. The 6770 is a great choice.

[mapes]

Well whats wrong with buying a inexpensive vid card and just slapping it in. Windows supports multi monitors on multi adapters? Also if the apps she's running require more power just buy another pc and use synergy+

[Devldog0351]

id go 6870 for longevity

[Luis_Dark]

great!, thanks guys

no gaming intended, she only uses M.Office, Adobe CS5, and sometimes she hooks up the TV and watch movies while she's doing homework hehe

I got my eye on these 2:

http://www.amazon.com/SAPPHIRE-Radeo...4497151&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/HIS-Radeon-128...4497202&sr=1-9

[NateTheBrewer]

great!, thanks guys

no gaming intended, she only uses M.Office, Adobe CS5, and sometimes she hooks up the TV and watch movies while she's doing homework hehe

I got my eye on these 2:

http://www.amazon.com/SAPPHIRE-Radeo...4497151&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/HIS-Radeon-128...4497202&sr=1-9

Luis,

We recently needed to upgrade our supervisor's station at work to 3 monitors and ran into the following roadblocks... Your mileage may vary as ours is a business, so we are (were) using an old OS, etc...

1. If you have onboard video and a PCIe slot, then you should be able to use the onboard video in addition to a dual head (most of the gaming GFX cards we use)... I know you can do this with Nvidia, so I would assume ATI would be fine too.

2. If it does not have onboard video, and you use the PCIe slot for video, you could use a combination of a dual-head card there and a PCI video card. PCI video cards are cheap, but also perform horribly. Also, many 'manufactured' PC's (in other words not custom built) have chipsets and BIOS that have issues booting with 1 video card in the PCIe slot and one in the PCI slot. Dell is a big example here...

3. Once you have ruled out the above, a triple head card is what you want to go with, but keep in mind that the number of heads (read this as 'simultaneous outputs') is not always as many as the number of outputs on the card. I know for years the Nvidia cards had 2 DVI and 1 RCA (through a dongle) output, and you could only technically use 2 of these at the same time. If you look at the reviews of the 6870 someone seemed to have issues with this. You are better off with a workstation card like this: http://www.visiontek.com/vhdci/hd-5450-3-port.html. This is the one we ended up going with at work because it is designed to output to all 3 at the same time, and not suck as much power (keep in mind that she doesn't have a gaming rig, so you through in a high horsepower card and you may have to replace the power supply as well). We got this card from our Dell rep for 160-170 bucks, so you should be able to find it online for the same or cheaper.

4. Beware of cheap 4-monitor cards that are actually a trick... they are dual head cards with 'port multiplier' on each output, that takes 2 extra-wide-desktops and spans each one across 2 screens.

5. Make sure all of her monitors are DVI... If the monitors only have analog D-Sub connectors, and the card has a DVI connector without the 4 analog pins around the 'blade' you can't use a simple adapter, you have to use an active converter to change the digital-only signal to analog... These aren't cheap.

6. What OS is she using. If Vista or Win 7 then you are fine. We had to finally upgrade at work because apparently XP has a limit of 2 desktops per card. This means that if you have 2 dual-output cards in 2 PCIe slots, but non SLI, you are fine, but if all of them are on one card, you only get 2 outputs at a time, regardless of how many you have. Pretty sure this shouldn't matter, as most people at home have not been using XP for a while.