 Ati Hd 2400 Pro Video Cards, multiple video cards |
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 Jul 9 2008, 06:25 AM
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 New Member  Group: Members Posts: 4 Joined: 9-July 08 From: West Texas Member No.: 221,360  |
In case it is important I have a Gateway GT5028 with a DualCore AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2000 MHz 3800+, and running XP Media Center Edition SP2, with 2 gigs of memory. Though I don't know what half of that means. I recently bought a new HD TV and wanted to be able to hook it up to my PC as I used to with my old standard TV. Since it is HD I wanted to use an HDMI cable in order to get both video and audio through the same line so I needed a new video card. I got a bargain on a PCI express x16 VisionTek Radeon HD 2400 Pro that has an HDMI, a DVI, and a VGA port. I looked it up and found that it had dual monitor support. While it isn't a great card I am not a gamer anyway so all I wanted was to run a little HD video and mostly regular video to my TV and still have my desktop on my regular 19" LCD monitor on my PC. The card works great on my tv, both HD video and regular video look great after some tweaking, and the audio runs good too. But I did not find out until after I ran through a lot of trial and error with hook ups and updating the catalyst drivers that it does not support 2 digital monitors. I cannot connect both HDMI and VGA or HDMI and DVI. So while the card works for my TV I can not get the dual monitors to work on it. I would need to have an analog monitor on my pc to have the dual monitor set up with this single card. I can't use my onboard card and the PCI E card together so I installed a really old Radeon 9250 card to a regular PCI port to use on my monitor. I connected it through VGA, because the only other option on the old card is S-video, and now have really bad performance on my monitor. I can't even get WinDVD to play on it, even on regular DVDs I have to move it to the TV display. And I can play regular DVDs on Power DVD but the picture bleeds, looks choppy, and sometimes freezes. Even decent 600x400 XVID and DIVX look bad on it. The best I can do is with files at about 480x380, which don't look great on a slightly larger screen anyway, but they at least won't bleed or pixel. So I want to continue to run my TV off the HDMI in 720P and my PC monitor on a DVI at 1280x1024. The monitor doesn't need to handle a lot, as long as I can at least play old anime DVDs and regular divx and xvid, which don't look too good on the larger TV, I'd be happy. Since I don't want to spend a lot on another PCIe card that has both HDMI and DVI and can handle both displays, I was looking into regular PCI cards that can at least allow the regular video and DVD playback on the monitor. I found another good price on a PCI HD 2400 pro, so I was wondering if it's possible to run 2 hd 2400 pros, one on PCI and the other on PCIe. And also if the PCI card would at least allow me the performance expectation I'm looking for, low as it is. Sorry if this was too long, I should have probably made it less wordy. Any help will be greatly appreciated. |
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Jul 9 2008, 09:16 AM
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Forum Addict Group: Members Posts: 5,011 Joined: 3-September 05 From: Killeen, TX Member No.: 33,068 |
Related reading:
http://askville.amazon.com/connect-DVI-com...questId=5895194 I interpret this as saying that maybe you should get an adapter, with no promise that it will work properly. http://freepctech.com/pc/001/guide_dual_monitors.shtml I still live in the analog era  and I've never been interested in dual-monitors, so I suggest waiting for inputs from some of the more knowledgeable members/visitors...in response to your situation .Louis This post has been edited by hamluis: Jul 9 2008, 09:16 AM |
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Jul 9 2008, 11:28 AM
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New Member Group: Members Posts: 4 Joined: 9-July 08 From: West Texas Member No.: 221,360 |
Thanks for the reply, Louis.
I can get a video card that has dual DVI links and can offer the dual monitor support on a single card but I really want to keep the direct HDMI port that my current card has because it has integrated audio. A DVI to HDMI adapter wouldn't give me this option. I would have to run a separate cable, or cables now, to have direct audio from my TV. And I do have the dual monitors working (actually right now if I had an extra analog tv with S-video connector and a spare CRT monitor I could probably get 4 to work, but...), I just want better performance on my PC monitor without losing the HDMI with both audio and video to the TV. |
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Jul 9 2008, 12:09 PM
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Forum Addict Group: Members Posts: 5,011 Joined: 3-September 05 From: Killeen, TX Member No.: 33,068 |
Understood
, hang on until some of the others get a chance to read/visit.Louis |
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