Finally, my Dad's upgrading his mac. We know it's going to be a G5 (probably the dual 1.8Gig) and amazingly he's discovered that he needs more desktopspace. Is it (still?) possible to add a PCI graphics card to the AGP for another monitor? Is there a realistic limit to this considering he's only using protools and not being particularly graphics intensive?

So far I'm considering the radeon 9600 and 7000 cards. They'll also need to be OSX 10.3 capable.

All the graphics cards supplied with Macs are capable of supporting two monitors. Most have a DVI port and an ADC port. If you want two DVI ports, you'll need an adapter to convert the ADC port to DVI ($29 from the apple store). If you want two VGA ports, you'll need an ADC to VGA adapter ($24) and the DVI to VGA adapter that should come supplied with the Mac.

You can use a PCI graphics card in addition to the AGP card, Apple do a Radeon 9200 PCI for an extortionate $129.

The 9600 is a good bet over the stock NV 5200 on that configuration. And if he needs more than 2 displays, he can easily add 1, 2 or 3 RADEON 9200 PCI cards. Each of those also supports two displays (DVI-I and VGA or TV).

Unlike some "cheaper" PC 9200 cards, the Mac version has three outputs, including one digital and 128MB of memory. The board is also using more expensive components than the "ColorPower" half-height models that may be going around. I would have been more pleased if the card had come out at $99, but $130 isn't terrible considering the extra costs of developing (and testing) on a Mac. The beta testers loved that card by the way.

Bruno

Windows supports 9 displays, if you can cram 9 PCI cards in a single machine (or create a "display server" like I always wanted to). Don't know about Mac though.

Your limit will be the number of PCI slots. G5 units have 3 plus the AGP slot. So 4 total video cards would be 8 displays off a G5. The OS as far as I know will deal with that just fine.

The limit is actually PCI address space. There are issues with some system and OS combinations making the practical limit less than the total number of PCI slots available.

The last time I did this type of test (about 2 months ago) I hooked up 6 displays. 4 LCDs and 2 CRTs. Using a 9600 and two 9200 PCI cards in some random G5.

In the future, perhaps we'll have cards with more than two outputs and then you can really go nuts. We've already announced some FireMV cards on the Windows side for people who are in to multi-display trading systems and such (or other 2D-focused uses). 4 outputs from one card.

Bruno

Not to take this too far off topic, but Bruno, I was wondering. There has been talk about the ability to run the 10" Cinema Display on a PC. Any idea if that's possible? Who knows, maybe I'll sell some body parts and get one of those

10" ?

He means 30" I believe

Right now, the only way to run it at full resolution on a Windows machine would be to use a workstation card, like our FireGL X3 card or perhaps an NV quadro board that supports Dual-Link and 2560x1600. I suppose you might also be able to use a 3DLabs Wildcat to drive it, but that will cost you about $1600. Unfortunately, you're luckly to have crappy game performance on these workstation cards if you're into that sort of thing.

We'll have a Mac board out to support it later this year (we showed it last month in NYC at DigitalLife). And the benefit here is fantastic game and workstation app performance. You can even play games full screen at full resolution. Frame rates heavily dependent on the game of course. I don't know when we'll see dual-link support in a PC-based consumer card. I've already suggested it though. Apple alone would likely move quite a number of them.

Bruno

Thanks, that's about where I thought we stood. And yeah, I have no idea why I wrote 10"

It looks like if I get anything, It'll be a 23" widescreen LCD. HP has a good one that's pretty cheap compared to the insane prices of a year or two ago.