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marcbkk · Forum Regular Joined: 19 May 2005 Posts: 12

I am running an ASUS P4S800D-X motherboard with a Pentium IV 3Ghz CPU and 2GB of ram. I currently have an Asus A9550 AGP graphics card with 128MB of RAM and which has one DVI port and on VGA port.

I had been running a single Apple Widescreen 20” cinema display on the DVI port for a year or so.

Now I just added a second monitor which is a Dell 24” Widescreen Ultrasharp display to make it a dual monitor setup. The Dell is capable of running on both a VGA or DVI signal, but since my graphics card only has one DVI port, I have the Dell running on the VGA port and the moment.

I use the computer mainly for Photoshop and working on 50-150MB image files.

I found that images look sharper on the Apple, even though it is almost 2 years old already. My guess is that the Dell would be much sharper if I had it running also on a DVI port.

I have been looking at AGP cards that I can upgrade to, although there are not many to choose from. There is one by ASUS I have been looking at with 512MB of RAM which is the Asus HD2600. I am also looking at a Sapphire X1950 Pro also with 512MB of RAM.

Before I make a new video card purchase I want to make sure I am going to get the right thing.

If anyone could answer the following questions it would be much appreciated:

1 – If I put the Dell monitor also on a DVI port will I see a noticeable difference in sharpness over the VGA signal it is running on now?

2 – Will a graphics card with 512MB of RAM versus 256MB of RAM make a noticeable difference in performance for the type of work I am doing which as I said is primarily Photoshop with large photo files?

3 – I had heard that the Sapphire X1950 Pro is one of the fastest graphics cards. For the work I am doing do I need something as fast as this?

4 – I also heard that the Sapphire card requires lots of power and could be a problem in some machines. Is this something to be concerned about?

5 – If I upgraded to say a graphics card with 256MB of RAM and 2 DVI ports, would this be enough of an upgrade to increase the sharpness on the Dell and overall increase in performance I am looking for?

6 – Are there any other graphics cards available that would offer to DVI ports with an AGP slot with either 256MB or 512MB of RAM worth considering instead of the ones I mentioned above?

Thank you for your time and hoping to get some good guidance on this.