Dual Monitors at 1600x1200, what card do I need? 6800?

[kingradar]

Folks

I just got a new monitor for Chirstmas. Its a Dell 2001 FPW, to go along with my Samsung 213T. I finally installed everything, and got it working correctly, but my video card appears to be just too slow.

I currently have an ASUS GeForce 5200 FX. I'm running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The problem is that when I scroll down a page, or bring up a new window it takes about 1-2 seconds for the screen to render. That's just plain annoying. So I figure its time to upgrade.

The question is, what kind of GPU horse power does it take to run two monitors at that resolution? The 213T runs natively at 1600x1200, and the 2001 FPW runs natively at 1680x1050 (its widescreen).

I don't have a huge budget, and I want to upgrade my CPU/Mobo/Ram at the same time. What are your suggestions?

I am thinking a P4 3.2g or Athlon XP 3400, with 2g of Ram. The question is what board do I get? Can I get away with a 6600, or should I go with a 6800? The 7800 is probably too expensive.

Thanks,

 

[pyrix]

Hold up, u said u wanted to upgrade to an Athlon XP 3400+, but 7800 was too expensive for you. If it is an Athlon XP, and not an Athlon 64 as I suspect it is, NONE of the Xp's have PCI-E, meaning you couldnt run a 7800GT becuase it physically wouldnt fit.

Anyways, you can probably get away with a 6600GT for now, running redhat, but if you were planning on installing Vista down the road, I would recommend getting a 6800GS or Radeon X1600XT, the 7800 cards are probably a bit of an overkill for what you are doing.

Anyways, a 3400+, 2gb of RAM, and a decent motherboard will do you well. On a sidenote, you could get an SLI/Crossfire board (one of the newer ones), and just get two 6200 or X1300 cards, one for each monitor, which would probably do you well as well.

 

[kingradar]

Did a little more research. Leaning towards a P4 - 640, with the ECS 945P-A motherborad. It comes with PCIe. With 2G of PC4200 memory, I'll be in around 400.

Thinking I could match that with a BFG 6800GT OC 128M, with dual DVI outs for 229.

Fry's is also selling the 3D Fusion 7800GT for 399. Not sure if its worth the extra 170 though.

 

[ltcommander_data]

It depends on what you plan on doing. If you play games then the 7800GT might be worth it. If you mainly do office work then the 6800GT will be fine. The new ATI X1xxx series is suppose to have good support for multiple high-res moniters though because of their dual-link DVI ports.

If you are getting a 640 you might want to wait a few weeks. Intel is releasing Cedar Mill on December 27, which runs on 65nm technology. The 641 will run fine on all current 945, 955 and 975 motherboards yet only uses 79% of the power of the 640. They may be slightly more expensive at the beginning, but they are supposed to be direct line replacements for the current Prescott 2Ms.

 

[the_guru]

The scrolling problem is CPU or driver related. Either your computer is doing something else that takes a lot of CPU power or you haven't installed the driver from Nvidia.

 

[ChipDeath]

I agree. I happily used 2 monitors at work for a few years with considerably crapper hardware (2 separate cards, but we're talking "Ati Rage IIC" standards here..).. And I currently have a twin monitor setup running on a dual-head Geforce2MX card, and that's fine.

I've seen that kind of problem on plenty of systems (only in windows though), and it's always been (lack of usually) Video Drivers.

a 5200 is a bit crap, but it should easily be able to just power 2 screens.

Try Good ol' Windows :mrgreen:.. I bet you'll not have the problem there, proving that it's not a hardware issue....

Bloody penguin lovers... :roll: :tongue: