NVIDIA card for two large screens (no gaming)

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Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 12, 2013
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I'm building a home office rig (programming) with two 27" screens that can handle a 2560 x 1440 resolution and need a video card to run them. The machine would run Fedora Linux, so I'm looking for an NVIDIA card as my experience is that the closed source drivers are the most stable under KDE.

Does anyone know any cards that can do this and are both cheap and silent. A plus would be supporting OpenGL 4.0+, since I was planning on learning basic OpenGL at some point as that seems to be creeping in to UI stuff on Linux.
 
you need a card with 2 dual link dvi outputs, so that pretty much means NVIDIA, but you will have to look specs closer to check if teh card really has 2 dual link DVIs.
The cheapest 2x Dl-DVI card with tested linux support that i could found is this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127705
http://us.msi.com/product/vga/N210-512D2.html
http://www.amazon.com/MSI-Computer-Corp-PCI-Express-N210-512D2/dp/tech-data/B009K1PY3S/ref=de_a_smtd

You did right to ask here because most geforce 210 have 1xDl-DVI + 1x HDMI, and you need 2x DL-DVi to work.
 
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Thanks, it did concern me that you need DL-DVI in order to run a screen at that resolution using a DVI link. Many cards seem to have both HDMI and DVI, so I would expect that the one DVI is a DL-DVI? Would any such card also work, since most monitors also support HDMI input or do you have to use either input and can't use both DVI and HDMI at the same time? I was actually thinking of getting a GTX660 card, since that was the cheapest chip supporting OpenGL 4.3.

I haven't really followed graphics stuff at all. When I knew something about graphics cards, the 3DFX Voodoo was the king of the hill...
 
Thanks, it did concern me that you need DL-DVI in order to run a screen at that resolution using a DVI link. Many cards seem to have both HDMI and DVI, so I would expect that the one DVI is a DL-DVI? Would any such card also work, since most monitors also support HDMI input or do you have to use either input and can't use both DVI and HDMI at the same time? I was actually thinking of getting a GTX660 card, since that was the cheapest chip supporting OpenGL 4.3.

I am sorry if i did not valued your open gl 4.3 support in my recomendation.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130791
http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=01G-P3-2621-KR
https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl-driver

Its a Gt 620 from EVGA, with 2 DL-DVI + mini-HDMI. For U$12 more you can get a Gt 630 with 2GB on DDR3 and faster clocks.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130821
http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=02G-P3-2639-KR
 
Interesting. I was looking at Wikipedia some weeks ago and it only listed OpenGL 4.3&4.4 for the 660 and up. Seems like the drivers are getting new features, so it's not a hardware limitation.
 
You better of asking in an opengl linux coders forum than here. not to mention that wikipedia is a poor guide to buying hardware. NVIDIA says 4xx and above have open GL 4.x support, but i would ask people who actually tested it.
 
You are right, though most people doing OpenGL under linux for practical use are working with OpenGL 3, since that's the highest supported by open source drivers. I was just under the impression that many features need hardware support and that the newer OpenGL releases would require specific hardware features and not just new drivers. This is why I was looking at Wikipedia as I expected this to be a static limit.

Of course, for the driver it's always possible to simulate any missing hardware features on the CPU. As I do not really care about performance, just want to play with the API, it does look like the 620/630 is sufficient.
 
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