Finally video card bliss....

I've got a system that has had a bunch of video cards in and out of it. After some ups and downs I'm finally happy with the way the system works. The purpose of the system has changed midlife. It started out as a gamer but it has evolved into a video system. System video card history (I'm a bit of a video card nut):

nVidia 6800 OK, I guess.

nVidia 7800GT Great gaming card in its day, would only output 3d video to the primary monitor, sucked for theater...

ATI 1950XT Pretty good gamer I guess but very noisy, good for theater.

nVidia 8800GTS Very nice gaming card. Video would display on 2 monitors but it wouldn't sync perfectly so it would display page tearing, not as slick as ATI "theater mode", stole 8800GTS to put in newer system...

At this point the system's purpose changes from gaming to video and it gets an...

ATI 2600XT Which games better than I expected, about as good as the 7800GT. ATI's cool a$$ theater mode does not work and video does not sync on either display with XPsp1 so there is massive page tearing. Piss me off! I bought an ATI card knowing that they are usually best for theater and the stupid thing sucks at theater (with the drivers at the time and service pack 1, this may be resolved by now).

The 2600 gets ripped out and gets donated to the kids computer and finally the system gets an:

ATI HD 3850 plus a software reload to LastXP 17 (fantastic software) including SP2. The 3850 crabbed about SP1 and didn't work worth spit so I reloaded a spare Raptor with that LastXP SP2 and it still didn't work right with the supplied drivers. Aarrrrrggghhh! Updated the driver and it came up in 640 by 480 with 4 color mode!! I was about to lose my mind. Tried to update just the driver instead of the whole ATI package and (drum roll please) ....

It finally works perfect. Got 3d (or overlay) video on 2 screens with one full screen and the other one windowed with perfect sync on both! No page tearing!

sounds like a fight for ur life there, haha. congrats.

Yes, I hate page tearing so I always force vsync. The 8800GTS (old version) will sync to one screen (the primary) but the secondary screen would show page tearing. I game on a 22" and play video on a 50" so with the GTS I'd hafta swap which screen was primary to stop page tearing.