Scott, you asked on Thu, 12 Feb 2004 13:26:27 -0600: > Can anyone tell me what graphic cards work well with respect to using > dual monitors and labview? How does the graphic card handle moving the > display data from one monitor to another. I was considering the ATI > Radeon 9800XT. Great for gaming as well. I remember someone talking > about having the diagram window on one machine and the panel window on > another. No more fussing around with the windows to do your work > faster. Well, here at getemed most of the devellopers have now a dual monitor system. Most of us have matrox G550s, but almost all dual monitor cards should work well too.
I had a project where the customer even wanted three large monitors. So I added two graphics cards, an ATI and a Matrox dualhead into the machine. All worked well, allthough (because of the 3 monitors) I had to use Win98 at that time. Here we come to a big caution: Win NT & 2k (no knowledge on XP yet) handle multiple monitors as two windows to a large and unique desktop, whereas Win9x used to have multiple independend desktops that just had to share one side with each other. This might be important, because almost all dualhead cards I know of have an excellent head as primary head, supporting video bandwidth of up to >250 MHz (and resolutions of up to 1600*1200). The secondary head is propably less capabal, supportimg only smaller resolutions. This may result in some area on the desktop that is not displayed on any of the screens in W2k. Example: One screen with 1600*1200 left and another with 1280*1024 right aligned at bottom. The desktop will be (1600+1280)*1200 and there will be an area of (1600, 1199) to (2879, 1024) that will be invisibel. On Win9x however there will be just two independend desktops. > Also, how about those kvm monitor switches? Anyone used those > in conjunction with the dual monitor graphic cards? Is going with an > extra PCI board as well as the ATI Radeon 9800XT AGP board the better > route than running both monitors off of the same card? Thoughts? > Comments? Monitor switches have to support the high video bandwidth in order not to damage signal quality. Try it out for the equipment and resolution you are trying to use. > One other off topic question. Have you guys/gals been buying > and using LCD monitors? Anyone running them for a long time? I keep > seeing used monitors show up on ebay that have a few/many lcds burnt out > or broken in the display. How hard and expensive are they to repair if > this is the case? I can solder as I'm a EE by nature. AFAIK this is an internal damage that can't be repaired and never ever with a 'burning iron'. Nothing to say about your 'natural' solder art crafting. (Hope this is got as that joke it is intended to be. Joking in a foreigh language is not so easy.) The LCD producers have even defined a level of defective pixels that are considered as OK according to the production standards. Otherwise they would get too few panels being OK out of their production lines and those would be too expensive for mass market. Greetings from Germany! -- Uwe Frenz ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dr. Uwe Frenz Entwicklung getemed Medizin- und Informationtechnik AG Oderstr. 59 D-14513 Teltow Tel. +49 3328 39 42 0 Fax +49 3328 39 42 99 [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW.Getemed.de
