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After trying (quite unsuccessfully) to get a Matrox G450 to work in twin view, I've gone another direction and am shopping for new, compatible hardware.

I have searched the threads and found the list of compatible video cards, but this requires that I determine the specifications of these cards.

I'm seeking instead a list of dual-head AGP or PCI video cards with VGA out which are known to work in twin view, on 10.04 or 11.04 with little or no tinkering.

Thank you very much, all.

Marco Ceppi
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Tass
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  • [Meta Discussion](http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/1685/i-asked-a-specific-question-it-was-marked-as-closed-due-to-exact-duplicate-i) – Marco Ceppi Aug 04 '11 at 18:40
  • No card is guaranteed to work with minimal tinkering, especially on old hardware. At this point, you're better off upgrading your motherboard and video card simultaneously – Thomas Ward Aug 04 '11 at 19:04
  • Related: [How to research graphics cards](http://askubuntu.com/questions/25682/how-to-research-graphics-cards) – Marco Ceppi Aug 04 '11 at 19:15
  • I'm actually considering just trying to find an AGP card which would have sufficient specs to work with a large monitor, this whole "dual head" thing is a PITA. – Tass Aug 04 '11 at 19:36
  • I'd love to upgrade my motherboard and video card, but this research is for work. I was tasked with locating video cards which would work given our present hardware. – Tass Aug 04 '11 at 20:35
  • @Tass have you had any progress on this issue? will you consider closing it based on the comments above? – rlemon Feb 24 '12 at 23:24
  • @rlemon, I had no choice but to give up. Will mark it as closed because I believe it's sort of a lost cause. And would encourage administrators of this site to please not be so hasty when closing questions. Good luck, all. – Tass Feb 27 '12 at 00:29

2 Answers2

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@Tass, buy a new computer. Or find another employer. ;-)

Tass
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  • Just to keep interested parties in the loop, our company purchased two new computers for our development team. We're now running 12.04 LTS 64-bit with triple monitors. Quite a step up! – Tass Jul 19 '12 at 14:21
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I'd personally recommend nvidia cards for their Twinview but you're extremely limited in what you can buy for AGP. The 6800 GT is probably the best card you can get fulfilling your requirements. Helpfully it's also supported by the current driver. I can't say how long it'll be until Nvidia stops supporting it but it's probably quite soon.

Just to make things even more annoying, AGP Nvidia cards are at that point in their life cycle where they're becoming more expensive than they should be, just because they're so rare. Damn you, market forces!

It seems odd to say it but binning the old computers is probably the best long-term plan in terms of price, performance and support rather than spending £50 per card for technology that is 8 generations old and might not be supported in the future.

If you need to evaluate it, you need to evaluate it. Buy one, chuck it in one of your machines and give it a spin. If it doesn't work, you've only lost £50 and the 20 minutes or so it takes to throw it in and test.

Alternatively there are devices like the Matrox DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go that combine two screens into something the system sees as one monitor. They're not cheap and the computer won't know how to make things fullscreen as it would in a "proper" twinview setup, but it's another option if you're desperate.

Oli
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  • Thanks for the input, @Oli. I completely concur, it would take much less time to just buy a card, see if works and move on if it doesn't. I believe I had proposed buying a dual-head NVidia but they wouldn't bite. Instead they told me to make it work. So for weeks I tried. As you might guess, my wages exceeded by far the cost of a new computer and a couple monitors. I eventually gave up and have been bringing my personal 2008 XPS laptop in to do rails work. – Tass Feb 27 '12 at 21:08