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I emailed Matrox to see if I could expand my two monitor system,
using two Matrox Mystique 220 4meg cards, to a three monitor by adding
an older Mystique 170 2 meg. None of these PCI cards are made any
more, but I got a response back two days later confirming that I could
mix them. I am very satisfied with Matrox products. These reliable cards,
which seldom need warranty repair, can now be had for as little as $25 ea.
so that you could toss them out if you did have a problem. BTW using
Tradestation, I can see no difference between the two cards.
Sigstroker@xxxxxxx wrote:
> A few comments: The newer machines do just about everything faster than the
> machines of a couple years ago. Ultra DMA disk drives, higher speed
> motherboard buses, etc. make my new 266mhz almost twice as fast as my older
> 200mhz. Also be sure to check how much memory is cacheable. Having more than
> the cacheable limit results in a performance hit up to 5% unless you really
> load up the memory. A lot of older PC's only cache 64 megs. Lastly, about
> Matrox, they are supposed to be very nice if they work. But if you have
> problems, support is a huge pain. It's a toll call to Canada with on-hold
> times of 30 minutes or more, and they are very unresponsive to email. The
> warranty is basically worthless, as the costs of actually contacting them for
> repair or replacement could well pay for another card from a competitor.
>
> In a message dated 1/7/99 3:09:07 PM Pacific Standard Time, eadamy@xxxxxxxxxx
> writes:
>
> > Before anyone rushes out to buy a faster machine they may not need, they
> > might want to do some tuning of the machine they have. The sad fact is that
> > while everyone touts processor speed, the real bottleneck on virtually
> every
> > machine is memory and disk (including swap file). In many cases, fast new
> > machines as sold without enough memory and with disks configured for
> > terrible performance. Memory is cheap and there is no reason why any
> heavily
> > used machine should not have 96-128 meg. Big disks are cheap too, but they
> > need to be properly configured and most manufacturers and users do not -
> see
> > Jan 5 "Shutdown- Access Violation at Address" in archive for my earlier
> > suggestions with respect to swap files. And finally, let us not forget the
> > controller of everything - the operating system. Those needing robust
> > performance and truly efficient processing, threading, and file caching
> will
> > take the time to install and learn Windows NT.
> >
> > My ancient, but extremely well-tuned, p133 with 512k of pipeline cache,
> runs
> > a dozen programs all day long including several in real-time and NT Task
> > Manager Processes Monitor shows that the System Idle Process continues to
> > account for 80% of CPU cycles and total process utilization rarely runs
> > above 50%. Even the biggest programs load virtually instantly. Every time I
> > think about dropping in one of the fast new motherboards into the box, I
> > look at the stats and conclude "why bother".
> >
> > I do concur entirely with using large monitors - 17" monitors which I used
> > to buy for $1200 can now be had for under $500. Ditto for multiple
> monitors.
> > Based on comments here, and my own experience, I highly recommend _matched_
> > Matrox cards where a monitor is to be attached to each card. These people
> > have been doing multi-monitor support long before Microsoft decided to
> > support it. The Matrox desktop software (included with the Matrox drivers)
> > does an outstanding job of changing resolution, desktop area, colors, and
> > refresh rate without requiring reboot. Due to poor design, my TimberHill
> > Workstation will not configure properly if loaded on a dual monitor setup
> > so I switch to single onitor, load the software, and switch back to dual
> > monitor all without unloading other software or rebooting.
> >
> > Earl
> >
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