This Card Costs Less Than $100, and Lets You Use Dual Monitors!
Written: Oct 14 '01 (Updated Oct 14 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap, multi-monitor support.
Cons: Almost no documentation on how to use multiple monitors!
The Bottom Line: An excellent card if you want a multiple monitor environment.
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| grimjack2's Full Review: ATI RADEON® VE, (32 MB) AGP Video Card |
A client of mine switched all of his Macintosh computers over to a PC environment a few years ago. One thing that he missed from the Macintosh environment was the Apple operating system’s built-in ability to use multiple monitors. Each graphic card you installed let you use a different monitor, up to a maximum of nine. At this office, one person had three monitors, and two others each had two. This worked great for them since they usually dealt with large spreadsheets, and liked seeing multiple spreadsheets side by side. Now, with Win98 and hardware like the Radeon VE, they can enjoy this type of environment again.
What seems really nice about this card is that the second monitor plug on the back of it is DVI, for a flat panel display. This worked out very well because they all wanted to get flat panel displays for their second monitors to save room, their eyesight, power, and etc.. However, when we purchased the first LCD display, it was a Viewsonic VA700, which has the standard monitor cable instead of a Digital output. This wasn’t a problem since the card has an adapter, but I found it funny that many of the new LCD monitors are avoiding having a true digital out connection.
Before I get into the specifics of the software and interface, let me give you some of the card’s specifications:
- 32MB of DDR memory.
- Multi-display support for combinations of digital flat panel and analog monitors.
- Direct-X 8.0 support.
- Flicker Free refresh rates up to 200 Hz, at 32bit color, 1024x768 resolution.
- It can also can do 2048x1536 at 60Hz at 32 bit color.
- DVD video playback and TV/VCR output support.
- Full screen, full frame rate, DVD playback without the need for a separate Mpeg-2/DVD decoder card.
- ATI's Video Immersion technology.
Display configurations:
- CRT monitor with 15 pin VGA, or 24 pin DVI-I connection using adapter.
- DFP (Digital Flat Panel) monitor - 24pin DVI-I connector.
- TV through a S-video connector.
- CRT + DFP + TV will act just like a two display system, with one of the three only able to clone the look of the third.
- CRT monitor plus TV won't work it the CRT monitor is attached to the DVI-I connector with an adapter.
- You also cannot have two CRT monitors and a TV connected at same time.
Also included with the card are:
- a Setup CD (which includes a simple DVD player on it).
- S-video and composite cables, and a converter cable between the two.
- DVI-I to VGA adapter.
Note: It only comes with drivers for Win2000, Win98 and ME only! Windows 95 and Unix users should probably avoid this card.
Very annoyingly, it only has an 'online' guide found in PDF format on the CD-ROM. I generally hate these because you often have to print them out before you can really use them. With a video card, your system may be down and you cannot look up the troubleshooting section without a video display. There was a little pamphlet of how to install your card into a desktop system, with pictures and a brief trouble shooting section, but there is much more in the online documentation, so I don't understand the reasons for leaving it out.
To add insult to injury, this is rather bland documentation, with nothing special about it at all.
When you install the CD, there is a nice display featuring things like 'Card Information' and 'Online Manual', but the one you want to select is of course "easy install". Mind you, there is no 'hard' or 'custom' install available. It is just their opinion that it is easy. Actually, it is quite easy, since you really have no control over what is being installed or not. It puts everything on there, makes all the settings ATI considers to be typical, and then it is up to you to go back and turn off the settings you may not want from the option menus.
There is no documentation at all included in my store bought, and full retail version, that includes any information about the multiple monitor capabilities! All I can do is tell you what I discovered playing through all of the options and reading the sparse help files that are reached through the software.
By right clicking on the little ATI logo in my startup menu you see the option "Gather All Windows to Monitor 1". This can be very helpful since monitor 1 is usually going to be your computer monitor, and there may be a problem showing images on your TV screen.
Also, there are the 'Hydravision hot keys'. Clicking on the help gave me boxes that told me I am now using the Appian Hydravision desktop manager. The “Desktop Manager Configuration” is the main choice. Here we get a hotkey list for Hydravision that you can assign things like 'Gather all windows to Monitor 1', and 'Zoom in' and 'Zoom Out' and 'Next Desktop' so you can cycle between what could be a hidden desktop.
There are some other options that I think can be very helpful. You can manually override dialog reposition so that it will always appear on the application's monitor, or else so that it will always appear on a specific monitor. The default setting for windows itself is that dialog boxes always appear in the middle of Monitor #1.
Another option is ‘Single monitor windows’. When this box is checked, windows are sized no larger than a single monitor. Windows that are placed on monitor splits are automatically relocated to the monitor on which most of the window appears.
Another option is so that you can have the maximize buttons on each window make the application fill up the entire group of monitors or just the one it is in. I can only see filling up all monitors as being very helpful if you are working with a group of monitors exactly the same size, and you want a large graphic or logo split between them. I sometimes see this at trade shows, but not often elsewhere.
Of course, you can also automatically align monitors back to the Win98/ME default settings from the control panel.
A second ATI button in the taskbar is the “Multidesk” system tray icon. There are no help buttons associated with these dialog boxes. Here is what I discovered about them.
By default it has a '1', but when you click on it, it goes to '2', which in the case of a single monitor system (before I had got the flat screen), it went to a blank desktop that still had all the desktop icons, but none of the programs will open on it. If I have several hidden desktops, this is a good way to switch between them all. With the multiple monitors turned on, it put the window onto the other desktop in the top left corner.
The multidesk properties defaulted to having 5 separate desktops. Why so high, I don't know? I lowered it to two just to play with it a little bit. It could be nice if you want to switch back and forth between two programs, or layouts, but generally, you won’t use this until you have the second monitor hooked up to it.
If you go to arrange multidesk, you get a dialog box that lists all the available apps, and then lists what is 'assigned' to each desktop. You can tell some apps to be a part of ALL desktops, but you cannot move something to a desktop from here. I presume I would have to first go to one of those desktops and re-open it.
Every window now has a little box to the left of the minimize button that is the new 'full screen' button that will share across monitors. Even when checked off, this exists in all windows. To the left of that is a drop down box that will let you select which desktop you want the window to appear in. It actually brings up a box where you can select the individual application’s settings, like how you want it to maximize, and what desktop to appear in. The software says it will remember this for future window's sessions.
After purchasing the LCD Viewsonic VA700 and connecting it, both monitors came up mirroring one another. I don’t know if this was a problem with the card’s drivers, the monitor’s drivers, or Windows 98, but it took me hours to get the monitors out of mirror mode, and into a shared desktop mode. The solution was to turn off the monitor plug and play detection, because it kept re-detecting the first monitor as a second one, and the second monitor as a third one. This was very annoying, and nothing I could do would allow me to set up the desktop right until I turned off the plug and play.
Another problem with the multiple monitor situation was that both monitors have to be set to the same refresh rate. This almost never happens!! TVs and LCD panels really want to be set at 60Hz, and most CRTs have a horrible flicker that low, and want to be around 85 Hz. What I finally did was set both of them to 75Hz, which isn’t exactly the optimum refresh rate for either monitor.
All in all, this is the best graphic card I’ve seen that was designed for a multiple monitor environment. It beats out my old favorite, the Matrox. I still can’t believe it only cost $89 for a full retail edition of the Radeon VE brand new at CompUSA. I only wish it came with some proper documentation.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 89
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grimjack2
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Location: San Rafael, CA, Marin County
Reviews written: 181
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Film is my favorite art form. I live a life of constant amelioration.
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