[clug] Decent video cards

[Darren Freeman]

On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 20:27, Brad Hards wrote:
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> I'm going to shell over some hard-earned to Cougar for a new workstation. I'm 

nonononono

if it's hard-earned go elsewhere

seriously I compared an invoice from Cougar with one from a competitor
and there was like >50% increase in cost.

Plus the last time we had warranty service done it was 3 trips to Cougar
followed by throwing hands up in the air.

They decided that the problem was that WinXP detected an IP address
conflict on the network and helpfully locked up to prevent the conflict.
Do you really want to give hard-earned money to someone who tells people
that?

> pretty happy with what I want, except I don't know how to choose a video 
> card.
> 
> Ideally I'd like a dual-head arrangement, DVI into a pair of LCD screens with 
> Xinerama. Last time I used Xinerama, it disabled hardware acceleration (on a 
> Matrox G400 analog card). I'd really like hardware acceleration to work 
> across both heads. I'll take analog outputs if that is all that is available.
> 
> I'd also like GPL'd drivers, but I'm willing to compromise for the sake of 
> hardware acceleration.
> 
> It needs to be reasonbly affordable. (ie less the cost of the screens :)
> 
> Has anyone put a setup like this together recently? Recommendations for a 
> manufacturer and model?

I just bought an Asus GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with TV out.

This gets you dual-head (only one DVI though, the other is SVGA) and
TV-out. Also turns out there's TV-in too, which was a shock to me for
just $225.

> Brad

I went through CES Computers. One downside is they kept me waiting 3
weeks on the motherboard, but might not be their fault anyway I was
pretty specific about an Asus A7N8X Deluxe.

Darren