two lcd-monitors on one pc

[psychoplop]

Hello,

I have recently got a MSI TV@nywhere Master card which allowes me to watch television on my pc.

I will get an old pc and monitor from a friend and I'd like to connect that second monitor to the pc so I could watch television on the old monitor and continue working on the newer 15-inch (also LCD, but high quality).

Can I simply put the old PCI VGA card in my PC or do I need another solution like a new AGP-card with dual view VGA and DVI (converted to VGA)?

My specs:

AMD Athlon XP2800+ Barton
512 MB DDR PC 2700
120 GIG Maxtor
40 GIG Seagate
VGA MX-440 AGP 8X with TV-out
MSI TV@nywhere Master (TV and Radio- in, nothing out)
MB/ ASROCK K7S8X R3.0
Floppy
NEC ND-2500A converted to ND-2510 with herrie firmware hack

Could I get some advice?

Psycho

visit my website at

http://www.wannes.tk

for info on linux, webdesign and music

 

[felixc]

The TV card will take bandwidth from your system, as it will use the PCI bus to stream the video to the ssytem, and then again it will reuse the PCI bus to direct it to the frame buffer of your VGA card.

So you will see a decrease of peformance of your system when you play the TV. And chances are that you see noise at the TV output when the PC is doing operations like disk accesses.

This is the trick with cards like the AllInWonder, or any other card with an integrated TV-in, the path for the TV data goes right into the VGA frame buffer without passing through the system bus, so there is no impact at all on your system performance. I have an AllInWonder9600XT, and it works very nicely. The hiccup is that it has no DVI out, only two analog VGAs out and one TV. But I think that some other models do have a DVI out.

 

[psychoplop]

Thanks for your reply Felixc,

The MSI TV@nywhere is indeed PCI but doesn't affect the system too much when watching tv on one screen. If necessary I could allways add some RAM-memory. Really want to use the card so buying an AllInWonder isn't really an option.

But, if I understand correctly it would be better to replace the current agp-card to a card with dual vga output instead of adding a second vga card on the pci-bus.

Psycho

visit my website at

http://www.wannes.tk

for info on linux, webdesign and music

 

[felixc]

A dual-output card will have a better chance of working properly since the drivers and the utilities are validated for the dual-display mode. It may avoid headaches.

 

[psychoplop]

Thanks,

I was thinking about buying the ASUS ATI 9250TD AGP, DVI Tv-out, 128mb. Does anybody have any experience with this card?

I'm not a gamer so I don't intend spending hundreds of EURO's on a vga-card. I just want to be able to work smoothly and I prefer a better CPU and more RAM over more fps on games I'll never play. I just need my pc for programming, website building, watching dvd's once in a while and Office applications, preferably in linux.

Will the card do or what are the minimum specs I'd have to look for?

Psycho.

visit my website at

http://www.wannes.tk

for info on linux, webdesign and music

 

[felixc]

The 9250 is a good deal these days, and it is still high in the priority list for driver support at ATI. I had a 9100, the previous generation, and it worked fine.