Need Some Advice Please

[eli]

Hello, I am looking for a PCI video card that has dual monitor support, good image quality, and that looks good with DVD's. What would you suggest I get?

thanks

 

[dualblade]

the best pci cards available are:
ati: 9250
nvidia: fx5500

i did see a fx5700le, but i think the le makes it worse than a 5500 because it only has a 64 bit memory bus and the same clock speed as the 5500. you can get either chipset with dual outputs (for 2 monitors) and both will have fine 2d quality. neither is any good for 3d, which is to be expected of $75 cards on an outdated interface

 

[eli]

what about matrox? Im not playing any games. Would matrox have better DVD quality?

Thanks for you help

 

[dualblade]

i don't know if you're going to see any dvd playback quality difference between matrox, ati, and nvidia. if anything, there's a possibility that the cards might have hardware accelerated playback, but i'm not sure if all or any have this feature. in case you don't know this term, it means that the video card's processor takes over some of the decoding work so that the cpu doesn't have to do as much. this is pretty much a moot point unless you want to watch dvd's on a very old system (~500mhz or less)

 

[UltimaParadox]

I would actually lean towards the FX5500 myself, as Nvidia's dual monitor support is much better, IMO.

 

[Lord_Exodia]

I agree a Geforce FX 5500 PCI good price, decent performance for a pci card and nview.

 

[eli]

awesome, thanks for all the advice