Noob question about multiple monitors

[roddyp]

Hi,

What is the cheapest card i can get so that i can run 2 monitors on a PC? I need it to operate the same way it does when you attach a monitor to your laptop. i.e. i need to be able to run Excel on one screen and Firefox on the other.

I found this on the rectron website, "PNY® NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 300 Workstation GPU, PCI Express 2.0, 512MB DDR3, 64-Bit Memory Interface, 2x DisplayPort via Converter", but this looks like it clones the screens as opposed to 2 distinct screens.

Hope this makes sense.

thanks
Roddy

 

[Synaesthesia]

Pretty much any graphics card will suffice. They all do dual screen now. I suggest an AMD 5450. Cheap and a bit more decent than the low end nVidias.

 

[Fudzy]

A lot of cards come with HDMI and DVI ports. You'll be able to use extended desktops with any of these (so long as your monitors have the ports/converters)

 

[roddyp]

cool. so as long as the card has multiple outputs i can just plug a screen into each? sounds good. (i thought that the card could only output onto one type at a time.)

THanks

 

[PsyWulf]

250-350 for cheap PCI-Express cards with DVI+VGA ports usually,just configure the driver to do "Dual" view

 

[ponder]

cool. so as long as the card has multiple outputs i can just plug a screen into each?

Yes, assuming correct interfaces on your monitors.

 

[Pada]

Some of the new motherboards (that comes with like DVI + HDMI + VGA) would also allow you to run multiple monitors.
One of my colleagues is running 4 screens (2 from motherboard + 2 from a cheap graphics card).