Changing Long-held Opinions
Posted on 8/28/2005 11:45 pm in Computers
I haven't bought an nVidia video card in a long, long time. At least not for my own computers. Why? Because I use dual displays on both of my main computers. But nVidia supports that. Yes, but their support used to be horrible. As I've discovered this evening, that is no longer the case.
About five years ago, I wanted to use a second monitor on my computer. At the time, dual display cards were very rare and very expensive, so I chose the cheaper approach: two video cards. Unfortunately there weren't many video cards that were inexpensive that would work under Windows 2000 as a secondary display. They would work in Windows 9x though. The difference is that under the NT versions of Windows, the second card would not be started in the normal fashion. There was a signal sent to primary cards that wasn't sent to any secondary cards. A handful of video cards at the time supported it.
I found the cheapest card I could at the time that would support it, the ATI Rage 128. I ran for a long time with that as a secondary monitor. About three years ago, I was building myself a new computer and needed a new video card. I did a lot of research on dual display cards. Most of them were still pretty expensive, especially since I didn't want it for graphics intensive games. Eventually I found the ATI Radeon 7000 VE. It's a lower-end card, but it had all the features I needed, including dual video outputs, for under $50.
I also looked at several nVidia cards at the time, but the biggest limitation with them is that they didn't like to operate with different resolutions for each screen. This was a big drawback since my displays were 17" and 15" and I didn't want to have them both at 1024x768. It just didn't look right that way. That's the reason I started with the Radeon VE.
I'm currently looking at building another computer to replace Goblin. I'm not in a big hurry, but it's getting to be that time. So I've started looking into my options for hardware. I had been looking at primarily ATI cards, but today I started playing with the nView tools on my laptop. It has a GeForce Go card in it.
I was thoroughly impressed with the options available on the newer dual display nVidia cards. I haven't seen those kinds of options in the ATI software. For that reason, I'm probably going with an nVidia card in my next machine. Plus, I haven't really been impressed with the lower-end PCI Express ATI cards. The nVidia cards seemed to have a lot more value for the price.
About five years ago, I wanted to use a second monitor on my computer. At the time, dual display cards were very rare and very expensive, so I chose the cheaper approach: two video cards. Unfortunately there weren't many video cards that were inexpensive that would work under Windows 2000 as a secondary display. They would work in Windows 9x though. The difference is that under the NT versions of Windows, the second card would not be started in the normal fashion. There was a signal sent to primary cards that wasn't sent to any secondary cards. A handful of video cards at the time supported it.
I found the cheapest card I could at the time that would support it, the ATI Rage 128. I ran for a long time with that as a secondary monitor. About three years ago, I was building myself a new computer and needed a new video card. I did a lot of research on dual display cards. Most of them were still pretty expensive, especially since I didn't want it for graphics intensive games. Eventually I found the ATI Radeon 7000 VE. It's a lower-end card, but it had all the features I needed, including dual video outputs, for under $50.
I also looked at several nVidia cards at the time, but the biggest limitation with them is that they didn't like to operate with different resolutions for each screen. This was a big drawback since my displays were 17" and 15" and I didn't want to have them both at 1024x768. It just didn't look right that way. That's the reason I started with the Radeon VE.
I'm currently looking at building another computer to replace Goblin. I'm not in a big hurry, but it's getting to be that time. So I've started looking into my options for hardware. I had been looking at primarily ATI cards, but today I started playing with the nView tools on my laptop. It has a GeForce Go card in it.
I was thoroughly impressed with the options available on the newer dual display nVidia cards. I haven't seen those kinds of options in the ATI software. For that reason, I'm probably going with an nVidia card in my next machine. Plus, I haven't really been impressed with the lower-end PCI Express ATI cards. The nVidia cards seemed to have a lot more value for the price.
