Dual monitors question

[m_andrews808]

ello all

okay, bear with me on this one because its a little confusing...

I've got two flatscreen monitors:

19" AOC native res of 1280 * 1024
15" NEC native res of 1024 * 768 (with rotatable stand to support portrait mode)

now I've just bought a cheapo second vid card so that I can run the both of them. If you look at the native res of each monitor however you can see that they don't match up, i.e. there is a step in my desktop from one screen to the other. Now what I'm thinking of doing is having the NEC monitor in portrait mode so its resolution is effectivly 768 * 1024 meaning the height of the NEC exactly matches that of the AOC eliminating the step but compromising by having a slightly less wide desktop (desktop would be 2048px wide (1280 + 768)).

So my question is this, does anyone know if there is a vid card that will rotate the desktop 90degs so that I can achieve this set up? It'd have to either be a seperate PCI vid card so that I can have two cards plugged in or a single vid card with multi-monitor support to replace both my existing cards but one that allows the desktops to be rotated independantly of each other. Ya dig? :huh:

My current primary vid card supports desktop rotation but its not proper rotation as the mouse controls aren't rotated to suit (i.e. left/right on the mouse translates to up/down on the monitor)

phew... hope that made sense to someone

:love:

[Jeff Wheeler]

is it on a mac?

I know mac's can do some pretty cool stuff with dual monitors, but I don't really know much about what though :P

[m_andrews808]

nah just a pc running win XP :-/

[Jeff Wheeler]

then I don't know about the hardware... I don't do that kinda stuff :D

[morse]

I *think* you should be able to have dual monitors without the same res on both, but I don't know how.

[m_andrews808]

seems that my current primary graphics card would be suitable for my second monitor after all, so if I could get the equivilent card but as a PCI version then we'd be rockin (the card is a nVidia G-Force 4 MMX 64Mb 8xAGP or something like that). Does anyone know if PCI graphics cards are still in production? Its my understanding that they're a bit antiquated these days over AGP, although my knowledge is limited to say the least so I could well be talking out of my butt

[Maxtr0sity]

Okay, here are your choices.

A. Check for an onboard, those can be put to use if necessary.
B. Assuming you made sure your card doesn't have dual monitor support, if so, do it.
C. PCI cards are fairly cheap these days. If you don't do anything graphically intensive, a 32MB will do (GeForce 2, 3 max). I've never done this, but theoretically, it should work. Plus, the nVidia drivers has options to rotate your entire screen so you'll be set on that end.

I like your idea! Never heard of it.

[.soulty]

like Maxtrosity said, i would go for a Geforce card that supports dual monitor(most do) and using the new nvidia drivers.. (forceware) with nvidia nview allows you to adjust seperate monitor settings, independent resolution, independent wallpapers, rotation ect...

at the moment i have a geforce 5900 and have pluged in two monitors into that. my primrary is a 19 inch while the other is a sad but decent 15 inch.. it works great, i have experience no hassle with it at all.