The Matrox Millennium G450 is very popular for this purpose. You can move between the two displays as if they were one monitor simply by moving the mouse off the edge of one and on to the opposite edge the other.

I'm in the computer business, and have been installing Matrox G450 cards in my clients' machines for a long time.

The G450 are stable, reliable, and the drivers play well with the other children. In 2D mode, the display is/among the very best for both clarity and display speed.

I'm running a G550 here but run Sonar on PC platform (win 2000). You will never ever want single display again after using duals. I first had an ATI card when I ran 98se and it worked well there but after upgrade to 2k their 2k driver would not allow setup like I had in 98se.

I run track view on monitor 1 directly in front of my vision and monitor 2 has plugs and somtimes mix view. I can not tell you about Pro Tools setup because when I bought full package it was out of the question for me here due to costs of full Pro Tools. You may wish to ask about its behavior somewhere first.

BTW I run 17" monitors just in front of keyboard and find this size good for my vision. I would not recomend anything smaller. For me 17 seems to be my setups limit because I do not like to have to turn my head to see all of the screen at such a short distance away. Also if you are not pickey about color match from monitor to monitor just buy what's best for you on monitor 2. If you want color match ez then buy same as #1. I have 2 different brands here and there is a big difference in colors but I've never taken time to try to color match them any better (probably not possible without overhead in processor or video card but I do not know that)

Good luck with setup and if you had said if you were Mac or PC I would have posted details of setup and how it works for Sonar if that would be any help to you.

[ March 06, 2004, 08:24 PM: Message edited by: jeeper ]

yup.. once you've gone dual monitor you never go back.... and once youve gone triple its even harder... Matrox Millenium P750 gives you the option of 2xMonitors + one TV out or 3xMonitors (analog mode) or 2xLCD (digital Mode)
there is also a Millenium P650.. it only does 2x monitors but there is a $90 HW upgrade for it to give you the full three... best thing about it is unlike the P750 it has pasive cooling = silence (atleast as far as the Video card is concerned

check their web site http://www.matrox.com

you can also see what the peeps at the MURC have to say 'bout these two lovlies....

my self i have a G550 ... upgrading soon to p750 hofully

If you want to do it on the cheap, you can install a second video card. Windows has all the features for running dual monitors built in.

In fact, you can run as many as you want...

Note: Most machines only have 1 AGP slot, so the second one will usually need to be PCI.

W.

I've found PCI video cards hard to come by. YMMV. If you go for a flea market card, be sure to see if it is on the Windows hardware compatibility list. No sense in getting a card that doesn't play well with your version of Windows.

IMO, save yourself the grief of tinkering with drivers, and get a G450 for an inexpensive price. It is full speed AGP, and designed right from the start to support two monitors.

I've never tried it, but in theory i'm not sure if it's a good idea to clog up the PCI bus with another bandwidth hogging card.

No noticeable difference, and PCI cards are easy to come by here (I've got about 20 laying on my bench). 99.9% of cards are compatible with any version of Windows. For my DAWs I use good old ATI's, which on most systems (even down to 98), the drivers are built in.

But don't take my word for it, I've only been a tech for 16 years.

W.

Guess you got lucky, Waldo. I was trying to use some of my (not so old) PCI video cards to accompany my ATI Rage AGP card and give me access to two monitors. It never worked - Audio was distorted and unstable. In the end I bought an ATI Radeon VE card that supported two screens (1x VGA and 1x DVI). Everything has been just great since then.

From all the other posts it sounds to me that the Matrox G450/550 is a safe bet. As indicated, I also have very good experience with the ATI Radeon VE under Win98SE and WinXP. Solid as a rock.

MisterBlue.

Guess I got lucky with the last 700 machines I shipped too ;)

W.

Second card works fine with me.. always has...

I've only been a tech for 31 years, and three tours at Intel, and an engineer at IBM for nearly a quarter-century. If we need to throw around our credentials, are mine sufficient?

My take on this is using the simplified approach. That is why I recommended a $60 G450 card with proven (and maintained) drivers for unified double monitor support on a single AGP card.

bgavin, whatever you want to say, I never advised to go one way or the other, simply stated that using multiple cards functions as well, being told that it doesn't work set me off, because it most certainly does.

W.

TheRealWaldo wrote: But don't take my word for it, I've only been a tech for 16 years.

Sounds pretty snooty to me. This one combined with your crack about getting lucky with shipping 700 machines doesn't play well.

Then again, this is a disavantage of the Internet... no inflection, no face to read. What is typed may not come across as what was intended.

As for somebody stating it doesn't work, perhaps you will go back and quote that for us? I can't seem to find it.

Guess you got lucky, Waldo.

And

i'm not sure if it's a good idea to clog up the PCI bus with another bandwidth hogging card

And

It never worked

Not to mention you stating driver issues, which, I have yet to encounter once. Sure, their might be issues with third-party hardware and third-party drivers, but who really uses that crap?

Anyways, you're right about inflection, it certainly seems like you guys are convinced a second card will never do the job!

W.

It's all good... just a difference in thinking about the best way to handle a client's needs.