Take the 2-minute tour ×

I've got a GeForce 8800 that I've quite happy with. It drives my two 23" widescreen displays well.

Now I've got a 19" standard display that I want to stick between the two widescreens.

My second PCIe 16x slot is unused (as is the PCI slot below that), and I want to add a card to my Win7 x64 system. This 19" display won't be used for gaming, so I don't need anything fancy.

Here are two cards I was considering, but I'm wondering if they're bad choices for some reason? If they're both fine choices, which is better and why?

Again, I'm needing to power only the 19" standard display with this card, and it won't play games. I just need 1280x1024 in Win7 x64.

NVidia: Galaxy 95TFE8HUFEXX GeForce 9500 GT Video Card - 512MB DDR2, PCI Express 2.0
ATI: ASUS EAH4350 SILENT/DI/51 Radeon HD 4350 Video Card - 512MB DDR2, PCI Express 2.0

share|improve this question

3 Answers 3

up vote 1 down vote accepted

You would be better off getting the Nvidia card. You can SLI it with your existing card and combine the power of both cards to drive all three displays at once. If I recall correctly, Nvidia enabled multimonitor support with SLI a while back, so that should work

share|improve this answer
Is it true that I cannot mix a GT and a GTX for SLI (slizone.com/page/slizone_faq.html#c16)? –  lance May 9 '10 at 4:19
I'm not familiar enough with SLI to say. You may want to look at Nvidia documentation and see if you can find that out. It's also possible that you could run the 2 cards simultaneously without SLI and get the 4 outputs. Again, I don't know enough about this to guarantee anything. –  nhinkle May 9 '10 at 4:22
Ok, so let's say I run the two NVidia cards with no plans to use SLI. Do I then install only one driver from NVidia? I mean... I download only one thing, install it, and it figures out what all needs to be installed to my system from a driver standpoint? –  lance May 9 '10 at 4:26
Yes. You would be able to run them separately with no SLI. You would install the generic Nvidia graphics drivers, and it would configure both cards. Technically, it's possible to do this even with an Nvidia card and an ATI card, but then you'd have to install both Nvidia and ATI drivers, which gets messy. If you have two Nvidia cards it should work fairly easily. –  nhinkle May 9 '10 at 6:14

You can simply just get a cheap S-video to VGA converter for cheap (which I'm sure your 19" monitor would support) for your 3rd monitor output from single card

If you specifically need DVI output there are s-Video to DVI converters but they are expensive as they are a scaler box / scan converter, not just a cable / pin convertion (as the s-video output needs to be scaled up to support DVI quality)

I run a single 8800GTS which has 2 Dual-link DVI outputs and one s-video output. I run a 30" monitor and a 24" monitor of the DVI outputs and the 2nd 24" monitor off the s-video port with vga converter , the cheap s-video converter I bought for the 3rd monitor supports well above the resolution of 1680x1050 which my monitor will do at max


share|improve this answer

I can't seem to leave a comment for some reason, but, lance, I have this exact same dilemma, and I'm interested to know if your solution worked out. How did it go?

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


