Re: Video Cards, Advise and Going Wacky

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Joel's exactly right, but has omitted that Win2K isn't truly Plug'nPlay, and
neither are some monitors, so it won't necessarily automagically find your
new monitor(s). You may need to do that manually, and it's well hidden in :
Start/Settings/Control Panel/DisplaySettings Tab/Advanced/
Monitor/Properties/Driver tab/Update Driver

You should have a 'driver' diskette in amongst the bits which came with your
monitor, if not, tell it to search your Win2K install CD, it may be included
there, otherwise check out their website.

Note that these aren't usually vital, as they often only define the
supported resolutions and refresh rates, so that Windows doesn't offer to
let you choose settings which could seriously shorten the monitor's life
expectancy.

Also, the maximum refresh rate may depend upon the video card's ability to
shift/mask 24 bit colour, so you may get an extended range if you select 32
bit colour.

D.

----- Original Message -----

Could those who are using a Matrox card with win 2000 please respond to
me. It only has 32 mg & I thought I wanted a 64 mg card. I like to have
my 21" monitor at 1600x1200 at a high refresh rate. I want to use an
extra monitor 17" for PS palletts etc. On my win 98 system I had a 32 mg
card for my main monitor & a cheap generic card for my extra monitor &
it worked fine. I am now using win2000 & it seems to be a problem. I got
the ati 8500 card to work for a single desktop across the two monitor
with adequate refresh rate on my main monitor. However when I went to
color management it showed my 17" monitor instead of my nokia 21". I
have a week or so to return the ati card & order a matrox. I just want
to be sure I will be happy with the 32mg matrox. I have some 3d programs
I don't use much but though the ati card would be nice but so far
doesn't seem to be ok for color management system.

--------------------------------------------------

You can calculate required video memory for 2D this way:

1600 x 1200 x 32 / 8 = 7,680,000 = 7.68 megs.

The first 2 numbers are your pixels, the 32 is the bits/pixel (you could
use 24 just as well, but lets make this a worst case since drivers
sometimes skip over the 24 option) and the 8 is to convert bits to
bytes.

16 megs would appear to be enough to runs 2 screens at that resolution
and color depth simultaneously.  32 megs gives you plenty of cushion.
64 would be overkill for 2D work.

The refresh rate has to do with the speed of the RAMDAC or the
bandwidth, I think, rather than memory capacity.

As to doing the extended desktop thing, I believe that Win2K video
drivers don't have the capabilities of supporting a dual head card,
which is what you're trying to do.  I think you'd need to go the 2 card
route like you did in Win98, or move up to WinXP, but someone please
jump in here if I'm wrong.  I think that your old Win98SE would have
supported some dual head cards, in fact.

Even if you were to run WinXP, I don't think you could run 2 different
color profiles off the same card, but you can select the "primary"
monitor and tune your profile for that one.  Again, someone please
correct me if I'm wrong here.  I have an nVidia card in my laptop which
I use to run the laptop screen and an attached CRT.  My color profile is
set for the CRT, but the video card driver also has a set of internal
color adjustments available for each connected monitor that let me
adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation, gamma and temperature for
the laptop screen to get it to match pretty darn close to the fully
corrected CRT.

Joel Rittvo


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