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[zeltak]

hi guys!

first of all season greetings to everyone. my Q is this i have an Asus nVidia Geforce 3 deluxe card with a tv out (both s video and the regular output..i think its called rca  ). anyway each time i want to use hairstyle on my tv in my living room there is a whole annoying procedure of changing the display from monitor to TV in my computer (which takes forever) because as i understand it you cant have them both, so basicly i have 2 Q's 1)does any one know if its possible to have a constant 2 output setting so that i get a picture both on my monitor and tv all the time and 2)if not can anyone reccomend a V-card that can do it?

[Jaguu]

Hi zeltak,

TV out is not TV out! This is one of the worst marketing tricks played upon end users in these last years. You would expect to have an output on both tv and monitor, but this is highly dependent on built-in chip and price!

Basically there are 3 types of video cards supporting tv out:

1) either or cards: Either you get the output on your monitor or on your tv out, but not both. They are the cheapest.

2) support for both with fixed resolution: You get output two both channels, but they adapt to the lowest possible resolution. If your tv is 800x600 your pc monitor will also switch to 800x600.

3) support for both with independent resolution: You get output to both channels, each channel can be set at its own independent resolution such as 1280x1024 on your monitor and 800x600 on your tv or beamer. Of course these cards are much more expensive, sometimes double price.

Look for items such as Clone view, Dual view, Twin view. Some cards support only clone view (same output on both screens), others support dual or twin view meaning that you have independent screens on the two channels. In this case you can have your standard windows screen on your pc monitor and for example a video movie running on your tv. In this case with MC10 you can also run a slide show on one monitor and another slide show on the second monitor.

The tricky thing is that video card resellers make those distinctions very unclear in their naming, especially Nvidia cards.

An Nvidia Geforce4 MX card belongs to the first category, an Nvidia Geforce4 Ti42000 belongs to the third category, don't know about Geforce3. You really have to study specs very carefully. Don't rely on manuals as they are often written for the whole family of cards and you would expect support for dual view, while it is not there.

So I would suggest the following:
1) Study your card specs very carefully, look for dual / twin view mode
2) Upgrade to the latest Nvidia drivers, Dual View mode is continuously improved over the whole family of cards.
3) If it is not there, you need to buy another card if you want output on both monitors.

This can be very tricky, especially if you buy notebooks. Cheap notebooks share video card memory with main memory and do not support dual view. And those that support it cost easily 300-400 U$ more.

[nila]

I have a matrox g400 max.
They have dual head and it's the third type and I have to say they're nice cards.

Works perfect for displaying to two monitors nicely.

[zeltak]

thx for the reply guys   but i have no idea how to check it i went to the asus site (http://www.asus.com/products/vga/v8200d/feature.htm) but it says nothing about the duel display thing. how do i check it? in the nvidia driver i only have a choice to choose a monitor or a tv and when i choose one it automaticly switches..any idea  ?

thx alot

Zeltak

[Jaguu]

That's one of the problems. Very often they don't say so and usually if the don't specify it, they don't have it, but you think this would be totally normal to be there. Try to dig deeper on the Nvidia web-site.

[Zarius]

Another option is the ATI Radeon 9600 (and other models too.. but I can only confirm this one)... works quite fine for two monitors or monitor/tv twin view (different resolutions fine on both) though it didn't like it when I tried Monitor/Monitor/TV :P  (although I haven't tried Monitor/TV/LCD Monitor... this -may- work *fingers crossed*, probably not though.) It's a pity the companys aren't more forthcoming about the exact capabilities of their dual/twin/etc view's... they'd probably sell more cards.

[RavenWing71]

I have played with the Multi Output on several different nVidia Cards.  I have even gotten a Jaton GeForce2 MX400 with TVout ($55USD) to do #3 (Dual independant screens) with a VGA and TV.  Mostly it requires finding the Pull Down box.  Go to Diaplay Settings.  On the Settings tab, hit the Advanced button.  Click on the Tab with the nVidia logo and your card's name.  In the recent drivers there will be a menu that apears to the left of the Window.  If both of your Displays were detected by the card, you should find a nView Display Mode entry in the menu.  In the nView Modes pull down box you can choose from several different ways of handling multiple displays.  I recoment either Clone or DualView.  If the TV wasn't detected you may have to pick the Troublshooting entry from the left menu and check "My connected TV does not appear in the list" to force the TV modes.

Oh, and don't be supprised if you are prompted to reboot when playing with the multi-display settings.