StarDestroyer.Net BBS

My father has decided to get a new work computer, and outsourced this thing to me . His only specific requirement is the system having two monitors. My question is, what sort of a video card does a setup like this need? Will just about anything with 2 display ports (say, radeon HD3650) be enough? He won't be playing games or anything, just browsing and using MS Office and such. The system will run 32 bit Vista.

Karza wrote:Will just about anything with 2 display ports (say, radeon HD3650) be enough?

Yes. Essentially all video cards have multi-monitor support these days. The amount of frame buffer required for even two displays is trivial compared to the amount of video memory even budget cards have.

To echo what Starglider said. Any 3d card you buy today supports duel monitors. The bigger issue is what 3d cards are supported by the computer. If your building from scratch, you can get around this issue. But in a working environment where you upgrade existing workstations or work off small cases, you have to take into account what physical size the computer can support. In addition, some specialized motherboards can only support a certain number of video cards.

There are workarounds for computers that can only physically have one video output, such as Matrox's DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go products.