[AG-TECH] Display Experiment: Different Video Cards

[Michael Gates]

I've actually got two of the Inno3D Tornado GeForce2 MX dual PCI cards in a new
Display machine that I'm testing with and it works fantastic.  I'm running them
in a Dell OptiPlex Gx110 w/ 256mb RAM, a single 833MHZ CPU running win2k.  It
also has an integrated AGP Intel video card that I can use as well, giving me 5
heads total.  One thing that I noticed is the way that the Tornado card does the
dual video.  It double's it's display size instead of creating a separate video
pane.  IE, if you're running two 1024x768 monitors on one card, it will appear
to Windows that you have a single 2048x1536 monitor.  Which is fine, except that
it will center things on the 'big' monitor causing splits like we used to see in
multi-headed NT4.  As long as you use them for the projected displays and move
all your windows into them manually, it's not a big deal.  I don't have any
benchmarks or statistical info, but OpenGL games and screen savers look really
good, as well as the video channels from the AG lobby.

-Mike

======================
Michael Gates
Information Technology
Support and User Services
mgates at sdsc.edu
858.534.8369
mgates at pager.sdsc.edu
Room 265
======================

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov]On
Behalf Of Ivan R. Judson
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 8:45 PM
To: Ag-Tech at Mcs. Gov
Subject: [AG-TECH] Display Experiment: Different Video Cards



Hey everyone,

Just wanted to let you know I put out an order for the following cards:

Inno3D Tornado GeForce2 MX CRT 32MB Dual Video PCI $145.00
Asus AGP-V7100 GeForce2 MX     32MB Dual Video AGP $196.57

The idea here is to have 4 heads, 2 on AGP, 2 on a single PCI slot.

These are both reasonably modern chipsets.  At least the performance on the
nVidia based cards seem to have been the best of the best lately.

If this works, and tests go well, I'll report such to you all so you can
consider swapping graphics cards.

The incremental cost would be ~$500.00, which I think is a reasonable cost
to upgrade the graphics on the display box.  If you strongly disagree or
agree, please chime in -- it'd be a good data point.

I will verify these cards work both under Windows 2000 and Linux.

Stay tuned, more details to follow.

--Ivan

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http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~judson
Futures Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory