Yeah, that's what it says.... certainly not correct now and likely never was. (I ran 4 monitors on my Win98 rig with 192MB RAM and it was never an issue.)
A good video card will come with its own built-in memory. 64MB on a video card is enough to run 2 monitors for trading. It shouldn't have any impact on your computer's RAM unless you install and use the fancy desktop features that some cards use. There are cheap cards and on board video processors that share your computer's RAM. Those will effect your memory usage. For most people, 512MB of RAM is plenty for trading as gnome had indicated. If you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, select Task Manager and watch the Performance monitor on your machine during trading, you will see that there is plenty of Physical Memory left even with 512MB. Good luck.
agree... i had trouble with dual fx5200 card with newer nvidia drivers. i had to revert back to drivers from summer 2004 to get them working.
I was only going by what I read on Dell forums, and my own experience. The forums did indicate that compatability was card specific and could end up being pot luck. In fact, some Dimensions did have problems with the Radeon 9250, but my Radeon 7000 seems to work fine with the OEM card. Dell motherboards can be tricky as far as what video cards are compatable and what are not. Also of concern was possible compatabilty problems associated with mixing PCI-E card with PCI card. Best solution may be to find someone with same computer setup, and find out exactly what they used.
As a rule of thumb.... I suggest doing a fresh install of the OS when you first go to multi-card. Left over crapola has a way of corruping multi-card setups.
I have 2 ati radeon PCI cards in my dell and they work fine. Running 4 Crt monitors on them. the only thing is i may have problems with are monitor graphics speeds but have not compared to other video cards.
Why don't you look at getting one or two used Matrox G200 quads from ebay. Many posters on ET have recommended them. It seems a much cheaper alternative than anything else. Also liable to run a fair bit cooler than stuffing a machine full of what are basically gaming cards. Cooler=more reliable. I'm awaiting delivery of two which also have TV tuner that I bought on ebay uk for just 30 pounds each. I'll be using them with Linux but they should be fine with Windows. There's also a G450 quad (newer and faster than G200) on ebay Australia for about AUD 400 at the moment.
Thanks for everyone's comments and advice. I bought the Dell 8400 with the cheapest video card (128MB ATI Radeon X300 SE) and 1GB Ram. I'll probably look for 1 or 2 ATI Radeon 7000 or similar for the additional monitors. I have seen the good recommendations for the Matrox G200 elsewhere in the forum, but there have been comments of conflicts between Matrox and ATI cards in particular, so I thought it would probably be best to avoid that.
Congrats on the new buy, however your conclusion about Matrox G200 is likely wrong. The G200 is a PCI card and so Matrox had to make an extra effort to attain best compatibility with other cards. (I run a Matrox G450 + 2 ATI cards with no problem.) Those who mention compatibility issues would likely find nearly all would disappear if they were to do a fresh OS install before fiddling with multi-card setups. Leftover crapola on the HD often gives symptoms of trouble which a fresh OS would correct. Your idea of going for "all ATI" is good, but the Matrox is probably equally good. One caution.... avoid "3rd party" cards. Make sure you get *genuine* ATI brand cards to use in multi-card setup. 3rd party card drivers can be trouble in multi-card.