Survey: 2 video cards or 1 - as a practical matter.

John_Beech wrote on 9/13/2002, 1:05 PM

I have a pair of ATI 64meg video cards in a 450MHz PIII. Oddly enough, despite first booting on the AGP card, as soon as the PCI card was installed, 'it' became primary display device. Anyway, here's the dilemma. It's video performance is immensely faster than that of the Vegas workstation (with 2.2 GHz CPUs) . . . as measured by the time-honored (around here anyways - with a stopwatch no less), "How long does it take for the cards to cascade upon winning a game in Solitire?"

Anyway, I wonder if (as a practical matter), 2 separate video cards running 2 monitors typically 'feels better' than a single card running 2 monitors - or is this symptomatic of an issue I haven't addressed?

Survey: if you run two monitors, do you use 1 card, or two cards?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/13/2002, 3:00 PM

I don't think there would be a demonstrable difference in speed that could definately be pinned to 1 card vs. 2 cards. Any speed difference you see would probably be related to a host of other factors. In my case i'd have to choose a single card because i don't have any more slots open.

By the way, Windows is designed to make the PCI card be the primary display. I recall reading somewhere that it was assumed that the more graphics intensive tasks would probably take place on the secondary display, so Windows reserves the AGP card for this if there is more than one card.

salad wrote on 9/13/2002, 3:31 PM

Go into your BIOS, you might find(like in mine)where you can specify AGP or PCI graphics device (default) at boot up.

HeeHee wrote on 9/13/2002, 3:31 PM

An advantage to a single dual-head card over a "one AGP and one PCI" scenario is that the dual-head should take full advantage of the AGP architecture, whereas the two card scenario will only take advatage of the faster AGP slot on one of the cards. Another advantage for the Single Dual-Head is just plain space. Like Kelly, I don't have an open PCI slot in my box because it's micro ATX.