I am looking for a quiet, low-power, budget video card that supports two 24" monitors (1900 x 1280?) for a Windows XP system (PCI and PCIe slots).
In particular, I find it hard to tell whether a graphics card supports two monitors. Apparently "dual-link DVI" is not for two monitors, rather it's two cables to support one big monitor? A lot of the cards I am looking at have 1 DVI, 1 HDMI, and 1 D-SUB (VGA??) slot. It's unclear if I can hook up one monitor with DVI and one with HDMI or not.
How can I tell if a card supports dual monitors?
Examples I've been looking at:
- SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6450
- GeForce GT 610
- XFX Radeon HD 5450
2 Answers
Google is your friend.
This shows "MultiMonitor: Yes"
Don't let "Dual-link" confuse you -- that just means the connection supports higher bandwidth, it doesn't have to do with multiple displays. Be aware of the different DVI connections though, you may need a specific type to make higher resolutions possible.
2Dual Link DVI can be for two monitors,
Dell has used this for years:
Or
But, generally if the card has two or more output ports than dual monitors are possible.
With AMD cards you can see if the card supports Eyefinity, this means the card supports 2-6 monitors (2 - 3 per card, with 2 cards up to 6).
Also, you can check reference cards for supported outputs, and some sites will let you sort by number of outputs supported. Although, to my knowledge just about every card sold now supports dual monitors. Even integrated GPUs generally support two or more as long as the physical port was added to the board.
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