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JeepGuy
07-18-2011, 12:21 PM
First a little background..
I have never been a member of a computer forum so I hope I picked a good one. I have a little experience building PC’s, I built one back in the late 90’s when I was in my teens from scrapes to play some old games on. I have also done some card swapping in newer machines.

The equipment I have..
Dell XPS 410 – aunt gave it to me, it has a 256mb geforce 7300le graphics card, a 2.4 dual core p4, and 4gb of ram
17” dell fullscreen – dad gave to me years ago
19” dell fullscreen and 17” dell fullscreen – picked up on craigslist for $50
17” gateway widescreen – picked up for barter on craigslist for $15 and some speakers that were going in the to the church yardsale the next day


I would like to hook up all of these monitors to make an awesome workstation for school stuff. This would enable me to run cadd , a pdf, an instruction video, and email all at once on different screens and make my engineering work run 100% smoother without a million atl+tab’s.

If you hadn’t noticed at this point that I have minimal money in this project at this point and do not want to spend hundreds on a graphics card setup to put it all together. The current card is in a PCIe x 16 slot and I would like to keep this card and add another dual output card to another slot. I have PCIe x4, PCIe x1, and multiple PCI slots available.

I have never upgraded a video card and would like some guidance. In searching newegg and tigerdirect it looks like I can get a 512mb pci card for around $50. This option seems appealing to me because for cadd work and playing sc2; a 512 should allow me to turn up my graphics setting on the game.

Is this the right direction? Should I look at something else? Please share any comments or advise.

RickyTick
07-18-2011, 02:35 PM
You just need 2 video cards that each have 2 video out connections each. Then it's just a matter of setting it up in Control Panel.

JeepGuy
07-18-2011, 02:41 PM
Forgot to mention i am running windows 7-64 bit.

So it does not matter what card i get and the setup should be fairly stright forward?

Can a pci cardoutperform a pcie card?

Simons
02-19-2012, 10:16 AM
when you get the 2 cards, make sure they are the same card and everything... you can't mix and match...