I'm planning to build a new system for my home office and wanted to know if there are any recommendations for a video card that will allow me to run two monitors simultaneously. Right now, my work involves a lot of Alt-Tabbing between open programs, documents and web sites, not to mention papers, I really want to be able to run two monitors that can show two different programs, documents/web sites at the same time. This system would be built around Win XP Pro and would mainly be used for work, not games, so it won't necessarily be cutting edge, but I won't skimp on the mobo, CPU, GPU (video card) and monitors. I plan to have two 17-inch LCDs running this configuration. Thanks for your advice!

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You don't need a video card that supports two monitors. Just add a second one to your computer and you will be able to use 2 monitors. Windows 98 and up will support dual monitors (except NT). So all you have to do is buy a second video card and second monitor. Windows will do the rest.

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Also, consider using the scroll feature if you have Windows XP (dunno if it's in other win versions)...where it displays only a small part of the full desktop...

...Or you can try software instead...there's software out there that supports multiple desktops where you can switch from one to another with a hotkey and have different programs running on each. I've not really delved into this so I can't remember any names, but it's got to be a lot cheaper than buying a second monitor and card :-)

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I would consider Matrox videocards which are having really good reutation about 2D graphics and true fullscreen video output.

For more information go here.

Parhelia Series of videocards supports also 3 outputs, which is really great, but price for them is kinda high

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I have two mons, it is very useful, I can be posting here at Trap17 while designing my sites at the same time, or testing the sites while designing them, its good when I need to write something up, internet on one mon, Word on the other...

Its fun too, I switched the setup of the monitors so that you have to move the mouse to the left of the screen to access the right monitor, my m8 kept trying to move th mouse to the right, lol. It got him well P'd off when I was using the right monitor, lol.

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