Help choosing video card for DAW

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WineLes

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Ive been slowly but surely buying components for my DAW which I hope to have finished in a couple of months. All I need is a p4, stick of RAM and a video card. I know a decent amount when it comes to computers but video cards are one thing I know very little about. I dont need a pro gaming card or something really expensive. I just want a card that will suffice for my DAW. The only game I might play would be Age of Empires but I doubt that one requires a really nice card. It would be nice if the card supported 2 monitors so that down the road I could have a dual display going but this is not necessary. I cant think of any need for S-video or even composite video inputs/outputs. The motherboard that I have is an ASUS P4PE. It has an AGP slot for the video card. Heres the part where I get confused. The specs says the card needs to be AGP 4x (1.5V). On Newegg I can search for cards that are AGP 8x/4x or AGP 4x/2x/1x. Which one do I need?? Any certain brands you guys prefer?? Thanks!!
 
Any Matrox G400/G450/G550 dualhead videocard will serve you well and they're very affordable.




A happy G400 owner.
 
Thanks alot for the reply christiaan!! Guess I didnt realize they would cost that much. Maybe I should forget the idea of the dual monitor for now and just concentrate on getting my computer running. So, any particular cards for just a single monitor set-up??
 
If you don't mind getting stuff from ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2776933216&category=40160
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2777022680&category=40160
And that's just two of many listed.

I got my G400 off an online ad very cheap (but not even that cheap) and it just works great.

The G550 may still be on the expensive side but the older ones (which work just as fine, just about the same performance) can be had for much less.

I can't really recommend anything else. Basically any card will work fine for a DAW but if you're interested in dual head, Matrox is the way to go.
 
Thanks again christiaan!! I love eBay and dont mind shopping from there at all, I completely forgot to check there. Ive found that the Matrox Millenium G450 is a pretty good deal. Its only 16MB SDR Ram but surely that will suffice for my needs.
 
64MB?? Really? My brand new Powerbook came with 64MB. I didnt realize I would need so much just for a DAW.
 
64MB necessary? Absolutely not!

A videocard in a DAW doesn't need to load textures like videocards do for games. It's all 2D.
Before I had my G400, I used a Matrox G200 with 8MB SDR at a resolution of 1280x960 with 24 bits colours. The only reason for replacing it was that it wasn't a dualhead.
My G400 has 32MB but I'm very sure that I would have been just as happy with one with only 16MB. Only for rediculously high resolutions @ true colour you'll need more.
 
Thats what I was thinking christiaan. I think the max Im shooting for is 32MB.
 
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