Hey everyone, I need your advice on a choice I have to make regarding my system upgrade. Currently I am running a X2 4400+ slightly overclocked on an ASUS A8N-Premium SLI motherboard with 2 gigs of Corsair XMS Twin-X memory and a XFX 7900GT.

I have been running two monitors on that card - a widescreen 21" (1650*1080) and a regular 19" (1280*1024). The GT was doing fine even if I was playing Guild Wars on the widescreen at max settings and watching a movie on the 19" full-screen at the same time. However, the 19" monitor is slowly dying (when I turn the computer on, for 15 minutes I have to keep turning the monitor off and on cause the picture just keeps going black) and I need to upgrade.

However, I don't have money for a full system upgrade, so here are the two options I was thinking about:

1. Ditch 19", get another 21" and another 7900GT. The problem with this one is that I can't SLI them, cause SLI doesn't support DualView. Hence, I would have to be running two cards separately, one powering each monitor.

2. Ditch 19", ditch the GT, get another 21" and buy a 640MB 8800 GTS to power both monitors.

What do you guys think, which is a better option? Thanks for your help!

Second option is much better.

Do you think that the GTS by itself will have enough juice to power both monitors (for example playing GW or WOW full-screen on one monitor while watching a movie on the other)? Also, is it possible for its peformance to go down because of my other system components? Thanks!

If the 7900 GT can do it then the 8800 GTS 640 can do it better. No worries there

What kind of PSU do you have? Not all PSUs can support an 8800 card.

screw both ideas...

buy 8800GTX and 30in monitor.... makes mouths happy

If you don't SLI them, a second 7900 GT will be a complete and utter waste.
Without SLI, there will be no performance increase if the second card was a 7900 GT or if it was an old 6600 GT.

Option 2: a single 640mb 8800 GTS and another monitor is the obvious way to go for what you've described your needs to be. Then you can sell the 7900 GT for a few bucks, too...

Aevm, I have an Enermax Liberty 500W power supply, I think that one should have no problem with the GTS.

Yeah, my initial thought was the GTS and the new monitor, but it never hurts to ask - maybe there would have been some advantage to having two cards and two monitors.

Thanks everybody who responded, I appreciate it!

P.S. If I had the money for that kind of hardware Raven I wouldn't be asking this question