ATI x850XT PE PCI-E + 2nd Card

[RazorbackHog]

Hi,

I have a customer who has a Dell Dimension 8400 with an ATI x850XT Platinum Edition PCI-E video card. He has 2 LCD monitors connected to this card but now wants to add 2 additional LCD monitors. I only have PCI slots left, so what video card would be recommended to add in? This is for a financial application so I don't think speed is an issue.

Thanks.

 

[Prydonian]

You won't believe how much trouble I've run into with third party video cards in Dell machines. I could tell you horror stories. But in the end, the one that turned out to be the most reliable and did not cause the NMI BSOD is the PNY NVidia FX 600 PCI card. On the down side, it does cost around $600.00. We're doing some pretty extreme graphics for our customers and lesser cards couldn't handle it. Dell was not much help as their approach was that since the card we were using was not certified by Dell, we were on our own. Thanks a lot!

If your customer won't go for a $600.00 video card, contact Dell and see if they sell a video card a for the 8200. At least you can count on them being responsible if it doesn't do what you need.

You sort of allude to the fact that intense graphics are not a concern. You might look at Diamond Stealth Radeon 9250 or the PNY Verto GeForce FX 5500, both of which cost less than $100.00

Mike, The IT Guy.




Life is too short to drink warm beer....

 

[felixc]

If your customer has such a killer graphics card, make really sure that speed is no concern with the four screen approach.

Software integration of the two different cards for the application may be more of a concern than anything else. You may want to check in his software information, for compliance with different video cards and operating systems.

Matrox is doing multi-display cards for financial markets, with full driver support.

 

[RazorbackHog]

Thanks for the feedback. My biggest concern is making something work reliably for him. So far, I have no real firm answer. I was hoping I would run across someone who is running an x850XT with another card and could tell me definitely what card worked reliably. Do you guys know if there are any reason you can't run a PCI-e video card and a PCI video card together?

If he didn't have so much invested in this card (which he bought with the system) I would just tell him to ditch it and buy a multi-display card. Still may, I'm sure he can get most of his money back by selling it on EBay.