Looking to put a video card in my desktop. The pc is used for office applications but I stream the local news and watch movies or sports on a pretty regular basis. Right now the gpu is onboard the mobo and that's hogging resources. Don't need anything fancy. Any low cost or fair value name brand will be fine. What should I go with for a 2 monitor setup? What should I go with for a 4 monitor setup? Thanks!
I have nvidia quadro nvs 450 displayport full height and another workstation with nvidia quadro nvs 410 half height. Both work well and economically priced. Each of them support 4 monitors. They do not support 4k native. They do support 1080p and better, check specs, i run them at different resolutions. I also have nvidia quadro k420 low profile, which supports 2 monitors and 4k native, I have not tried 2 monitors at 4k. They're all found on ebay for under $50 bucks.
I'm running 4 1080p monitors on 2 of these cheap cards without any problems. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16814130788
With onboard GPU, you likely have only 1 PCIEx16 slot. But that will be enough to run 2x 1080p monitors, and just about any dualhead video card with the proper connectors for your monitors from the last 10 years will be good enough.. If you want to run 4 monitors from 1 PCIEx16 slot, there are fewer choices.
Its NOT the same UNLESS you talk about the same screen real estate in physical dimensions. Text in 4k on a 27 inch or so screen is simply illegible to most human eyes.
Now it's problem solving time. I ordered a cheap card off Amazon just to move the GPU off of the CPU. System is a HP Pavilion. Onboard GPU is ATI so I ordered an ATI card not knowing if I could use only the PCIeX16 card or both. I installed the PCIeX16 card and device manager won't see it. Spent 2 hours on it and gave up. Went back to Amazon to initiate return and seller responded "Refund without return. Sorry it did not work out." So now I have this free card. Any idea why Device Manager would fail to see an installed card? The fan on the card does run. Do I have to disable the onboard GPU in Device Manager before it will see the new card? FYI: The BIOS does not allow me to select what GPU to use (I'm doing F10 at startup). What am I doing wrong? I've done this before with no troubles (nVidia cards) but that was 15 years ago.
Not a stupid question. No I did not install the driver. Device Manager sees things all the time that are undetermined. From there a user right clicks to load the driver and paths to the filename & path. If it's not seen in Device Manager, it's not going to work.