Which Dualhead videocard should I use?

Acid Man · Post by **Acid Man** » Wed Feb 27, 2002 3:31 am

Hi all,

I'm planning on getting me a second monitor to connect the the same DAW. My question is which videocard (with dualhead connection) is best to use in combination with the Pulsar II card?

I currently use a Geforce II card, but since I'm not using it for games anymore I think it's best to get me a smaller card with dualhead.

Thnx for your reply!

Cheers.

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Wed Feb 27, 2002 4:01 am

Congratulations. It is very nice to have 2 monitors for your music production. My secondary just died some weeks ago (the little Daewoo didn't like the 1280*960@68Hz that well I guess LOL). I have a Matrox450, wich works fine and gives good 2d quality. Radeon, I hear, are also quite decent with their 2d quality. Just don't go NVidia - they drive like *a not very nice place*: very fast, but not very beautifull.

Immanuel

Acid Man · Post by **Acid Man** » Wed Feb 27, 2002 4:53 am

I currently have an Asus v7700 Nvidia GTS Deluxe which was used mainly for gamez, however since I threw all this junk of my PC I don't use it any more (at least not for some heavy gaming).

Now it just sits and doesn't do what it suppose to do. Anyway, I use the Nvidia chip in combination with the Pulsar and it works ok by me...

So you say the Matrox 450 is ok to work with as a dualhead card?

Acid Man · Post by **Acid Man** » Wed Feb 27, 2002 4:54 am

Oh, BTW I plan on getting me a 15" TFT monitor. This should be enough to handle individual pop-up screens like effects and the Cubase mixer and so on?

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Wed Feb 27, 2002 5:44 am

I can not answer the cubase question. If you go Matrox, go for the newer g550. If you still game once in a while, you should maybe considder the Radeon.

Immanuel

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Wed Feb 27, 2002 8:46 am

Get the G550 with the DVI connector, and make sure the panel you get has the proper digital connection - less conversions = more pure graphics!

samplaire · Post by **samplaire** » Wed Feb 27, 2002 11:48 am

On 2002-02-27 04:54, Acid Man wrote:
Oh, BTW I plan on getting me a 15" TFT monitor. This should be enough to handle individual pop-up screens like effects and the Cubase mixer and so on?

Hi Acid Man,

I've got a 'plain' 15" TFT monitor which works great (the optimum an max resolution is 1024 x 768), the viewing area is almost the same as on my previous standard 17" Philips monitor (the screen area is 1cm smaller than the tube 17") but... the screen is sharper and my eyes are more comfortable (if one can say that way)

Acid Man · Post by **Acid Man** » Thu Feb 28, 2002 2:32 am

On 2002-02-27 11:48, samplaire wrote:
On 2002-02-27 04:54, Acid Man wrote:
Oh, BTW I plan on getting me a 15" TFT monitor. This should be enough to handle individual pop-up screens like effects and the Cubase mixer and so on?
Hi Acid Man,

I've got a 'plain' 15" TFT monitor which works great (the optimum an max resolution is 1024 x 768), the viewing area is almost the same as on my previous standard 17" Philips monitor (the screen area is 1cm smaller than the tube 17") but... the screen is sharper and my eyes are more comfortable (if one can say that way)

Acid Man · Post by **Acid Man** » Thu Feb 28, 2002 2:33 am

On 2002-02-27 11:48, samplaire wrote:

I've got a 'plain' 15" TFT monitor which works great

What is generally the best monitor to use then?

Cheers,

Acid

kurst · Post by **kurst** » Thu Feb 28, 2002 8:06 pm

Hi Acid, If u don't want to play games on the pc go for the matrox or Ati (personally I threw out of the window my G450...only because I make even some 3d graphic on the pc and in these kind of works matrox is a sitting duck...without saying the bad attitude of matrox to release new drivers every 100 years...) if u want to continue to play games take your geforce...
Right now I have another pc dedicated for games, graphic and home use but untill 2 weeks ago I used this trick :

Cpu, mobo, ram bla bla bla
1 Hd 45 gb with two partitions : The first with winXp in standard pc mode dedicated only to music with OS and programs. The second partition with Win98 only for games and the other uses...
1 HD dedicated only to audio files
Asus V7700 Deluxe in the AGP slot
A old Riva TNT 2 video card in a PCI slot
2 Monitors AOC Spectrum 9GLR 19"
A LunaII (Now Luna2+Pulsar2)

Dual head worked pretty good and I never had problem with Luna+Pulsar.

Anyway I don't suggest you this way of making dualhead if u use the DAW in a professional studio ... I think that the PCI wideo card wastes a very few of PCI bandwidht, but still wastes

Now I had a music dedicated system and I make Dual Head with a Radeon 8500 that I'll throw away in some months when the Geforce 4 4600 will lower its price.

Nvidia has the best drivers out there, they are about 1000 years ahead of Ati and Matrox and I'll stick with them. And it's not only me saying this... Check what John Romero (Id Software) said some weeks ago about Nvidia's and Ati's drivers

Bye bye

darolek · Post by **darolek** » Thu Feb 28, 2002 8:15 pm

On 2002-02-27 03:31, Acid Man wrote:
My question is which videocard (with dualhead connection) is best to use in combination with the Pulsar II card?

My vote - Matrox G-450/550 !

eliam · Post by **eliam** » Thu Feb 28, 2002 8:49 pm

I don't play games on my machine and my Matrox G-450 works pretty fine... On WINME, however, I cannot adjust the refresh rate of the second screen and this is unpleasant. On WINXP there's no such problem...

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Fri Mar 01, 2002 9:04 am

kurst,

While just 6 months ago, I would have agreed that nVidia had some of the best drivers, lately they have really not been so hot - including the famous "infinite loop error" (which many attribute to our friends, VIA), and instability. The 21.xx versions generally are more stable than their most recent versions! If you visit many forums you'll see they really have started to sacrifice stability for speed, ATi is keeping them on their toes, for sure!

Matrox releases drivers so infrequently, simply because they WORK and work WELL, I have been using a G450 for about 2 years now and have never experienced any problems related to it. They also haven't really done any new chips in like 3 years, so there isn't anything a new driver would add. For a DAW, this is a good situation, it means its stable and reliable and doesn't need weekly maintainence. I think if you're a musician first and foremost, that this point is important.

I do agree that if you game, an nVidia card would be my first choice - plus I heard somewhere that nVidia had hardware acceleration for the WinXP's-Luna-interface? That's pretty nice!

Acid Man · Post by **Acid Man** » Tue Mar 05, 2002 7:12 am

On 2002-02-28 20:06, kurst wrote:

Anyway I don't suggest you this way of making dualhead if u use the DAW in a professional studio ... I think that the PCI wideo card wastes a very few of PCI bandwidht, but still wastes

I already have a dual boot system running audio only and administrative apps.

I plan on upgrading the Win98SE audio boot to WinXP. Is this a wise thing to do? I currently am able to work without getting the BSOD regularly. Well ok, sometimes this happens. That's why I'm considering upgrading.

I haven't followed the XP discussion that well. Can anyone explain in short what the pros and cons are?

Cheers,

Acid

EarlyFirst · Post by **EarlyFirst** » Tue Mar 05, 2002 11:36 am

plus I heard somewhere that nVidia had hardware acceleration for the WinXP's-Luna-interface? That's pretty nice!

correct it's on the Nvidia site...

EarlyFirst · Post by **EarlyFirst** » Tue Mar 05, 2002 11:39 am

I haven't followed the XP discussion that well. Can anyone explain in short what the pros and cons are?

Cheers,

Acid

[/quote]

If you mess with the default settings it WILL get unstable....
Besides that, alot of stuff is dependent on things that have nothing to do with each other which very strange( I'm talking services) and there are a hell of alot of them running at boot, also even more you cannot even see without certain tools.....

kurst · Post by **kurst** » Thu Mar 07, 2002 10:09 am

Subhuman :

I never had problems with nvidia drivers ... unstability ? maybe something was screwed between the 8.xx and 12.40 but after this release (the drivers included in WinXp but i can be wrong

) all officials drivers were 100% stable and very nice to work with. About matrox I'm still of the same idea, I only had problems with that card in win98se but i never tested with Xp. For sure the worst drivers of the 3 producers are ATI's ones... they really are awful and full of bugs. Cursed the day I thought to buy the 8500

.
The only video card that I envy to matrox is the G200 MMS . 4 MONITORS ! Wow that's crazy

Anyone know the street price of this thingy ???

Acid : I use Xp with no problems at all. I had problems with the audio-midi sync under win2k but everything seems ok now. My system with only Audio related software is 100% stable and the nicer GUI let u work happier lol well at least the first day

About the accelaration of the 3.01 environment gui with nvidia card..... It's really cool

Bye bye

JoeKa · Post by **JoeKa** » Thu Mar 07, 2002 10:57 pm

On 2002-02-28 20:06, kurst wrote:
Now I had a music dedicated system and I make Dual Head with a Radeon 8500 that I'll throw away in some months when the Geforce 4 4600 will lower its price.

Nooo! Please, give it to me instead! Fortunately I never had any problems with ATI cards, and I would really like to have the 8500 if it wasn´t that expensive...

spacef · Post by **spacef** » Tue Nov 12, 2002 6:17 pm

Avoid this card :
- Gigabyte Radeon 7500 Pro
It simply doesn't work (XP/p4pe/pIV 2.5)

It has an "infinite loop at reboot" after installing the drivers, so you can't make it work. (edited) and i tried all drivers available, from ATI? gigabyte etc...(unedit)

I reinstalled the older ATI Radeon VE (built by ATI) and all was fine immediately.

(edited) so I just learned it's not necessarily a matter of chipset, but manufacturer.... dooh, I knew it already !(end edited)

I thought I could trust gigabyte for being a motherboard manufacturer, but no.

Ok, so the display with the ATI RADEON VE is working but fonts are blurred, which I noticed already but on a 19' screen (llyama lowest price) it looks like I smoke and drunk all day and didn't sleep the night before !!!

I'll have to get a card with good display

Too bad ATI won't make it to this newer system, but display is too ugly... very bad for developper

And Gigabyte goes to hell !

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: spacef on 2002-11-12 18:28 ]</font>

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Tue Nov 12, 2002 6:29 pm

Matrox....All the way, any model...They are not the fastest card, but they ARE the best in dualhead...period.