There is an ASUS card that I was prompted to that has the nvidia GF5 series onboard. It says it has dual DVI on it, but to be thorough, the picture shows DVI and plain old VGA on it, so I'm not sure.

Good news on the Matrox is that the dual head mode of 'P' series cards can be primary/secondary or primary/primary-extended. It is upto the Matrox configuration you select. This can be important for directshow overlay, but as Vegas doesn't use that for preview, I suspect either mode is of equal performance within Vegas.

P750 is a bit cheaper, and gains you AGP 8x whilst Matrox regroups for its next gen card. P750 doesn't earn the capability of WYSIWYG drivers but does provide directshow overlay to Tv-out (purevideo=32bit equivalent of DVDMax from the 'G' series). I'd hope that anything that Sony wrote (to support windows/pci-overlay aswell as compressed DV via OHCI output) wouldn't require a full Parhelia as Sony would only be serving Matrox with such a lock-in.

I'm reluctant to buy another Matrox product just now. I liked my G450 and still use it, but I can't believe that the VGA or Svideo/RGBs out of the Matrox cards is really noticably of higher quality than the nvidia/ati boards. I'd think very carefully before buying again. I feel that the USPs of Matrox are being held back by the marketing department and lack of mass market due to the poor 3d (OpenGL and some elements of DirectX) performance. I'm just not certain, at the right price I'd care a little less about this. So please bring on Matrox's next family of cards!

Check out that Asus nvidia board for that dual DVI claim. Circa US$160.

The Matrox Parhelia I purchased new was $375.00. Im driving a Viewsonic VX900 as the primary monitor and a Viewsonic VA720 as the secondary monitor, both with analog feeds. I also routed the TV output to my JVC distribution (JX-S700) to view the output when I do short renders or previews so that I can view the media player and the tv at the same time. This is not so much for colors but motion and jitter and the like. Editing is still done by the firewire to the tv. The CMOS setting of the AGP memory is set to max as Matrox states. Also running 2 gig of memory DDR 400.

JJK

Don't know about the price, but the nVidia quadroFX series seems like it has alot to offer.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx.html

M

Hmm,
found a few, PNY seem to make some nice dual DVI cards but they're even more overkill than the Matrox stuff.

Need to do more homework I think.

ASUS make some excellent low cost dual DVI video cards.
The 9560 VS sells for $235 Canadian here in Toronto.

http://usa.asus.com/products/vga/v9520vs/overview.htm
http://usa.asus.com/products/vga/v9560vs/overview.htm

I use the older version of this card to run two 19 inch
Samsung TFT 191T monitors. Works beautifully.
( The 3D speed is also better than any of the Matrox
cards if you like to do a bit of gaming for fun. )

Thanks heaps!
That's more like what I was after. Having to go through several links to check each card's detailed specs was driving me nuts.