I plan on buying a Mac Pro tomorrow, and I'd like to know what would be best video card setup to run my two 24" monitors (1920x1200 each). Would it be better for me to get 2x 7300 GT's (one powering each monitor) or one X1900 XT? I don't plan on gaming at all - I'm a graphic designer and mainly use Photoshop and Flash. I just want the smoothest experience possible. Thanks in advance!
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Mac Pro - Video Card Setup for Dual 24"s?
- Thread starter yanathin
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Are you sure you need an upgraded video card? A 7300GT has two DVI ports, both capable of running 24" monitors.
Your work is mainly 2D so the video card that comes standard with the Mac Pro is more then adequate.
To add a third voice, yes, the included card is sufficient. A 'single-link' DVI port can handle up to 1920x1200. You only need the 'dual-link' DVI port if you want higher resolution than that (like what the 30" display uses.) So you'd only need a second 7300 (or one single X1900) if you want two monitors that use HIGHER than 1920x1200. (Oh, and when using VGA monitors, you can have up to two 2540x1920s. VGA doesn't have a special 'high-bandwidth' port that's needed for higher resolutions the way DVI does.)
I'm just asking this question because from past experience, I've had a few problems running dual monitors with one video card. Right now I have a GeForce 6800gt in a PC running my two 24"s, and quite honetsly the performance is very sluggish. The mouse movement is choppy, and running Flash movies on my right monitor is about 10x slower than running it on my left. That's why I'm wondering if it would be best to have a seperate video card power each display so I get the same results on each monitor... Or maybe I'm completely wrong and OS X doesn't handle dual monitors this way.
