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Where Can You Find Cheap DVI Video Cards?
iansmith wonders: "I have a new Gateway computer hooked to a flat screen monitor. The problem is the video out is only VGA which does not look as sharp as a DVI output. To help with this, and also to let me run dual displays, I want to add a video card to the machine. In the past I would just grab a standard VGA card for $20, plug it in and go, not needing fancy 3D graphics. I do not want to spend $300 for a gaming video card... does anybody make a video card with DVI out that is not a souped up 3D powerhouse, with a price tag to match? Even worse, all new machines seem to be PCI-Express and so that makes it even less likely I'll find something affordable. I can't even use an old 3D card from home. What would you all suggest I do?"
I like the BFG GeForce 6200 Turbo Cache cards, for example the http://www.bfgtech.com/6200TC.html -- I bought the 64MB Model recently for a customer and it was under CND$39. The car has both DVI and VGA Output.
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
Newegg.
/whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
I wouild have to agree, Nvidia is probably your best bet. There a number of cards cards with DVI output that are priced below $100 US.
I often have trouble remembering which way is out of bed in the morning.
Yes, but it only has a single DVI out. The submitter is looking for dual dvi. I did a quick search and came up with this: http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page _id=5/popup6%5B%5D=10:594/popup2%5B%5D=1:596
There's a XFX GeForce for about $133, which isn't bad really, and that's not a bad card at all. I was playing CS:S with a 6800GT OC from BFG until just recently.
You can get a PCI-Express card for under $50 - an Nvidia 6200 at newegg
I have a 7300 for just over $50 and I'm quite happy with it.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
- Go to www.newegg.com
- Click on Video Cards
- Click on Advanced Search
- Set DVI to "1"
- Click.
- ???
- Profit!
Your dream $20 video card is actually $25 or $30, depending on if you want AGP or PCI....to first actually check out what stores have to offer before asking? Sigh...
A simple search on newegg should get you exactly what you want:
m it=ENE&N=2010380048+1069109630&Subcategory=48
d &btnG=Search+Froogle&lnk=pruser&price1=20&price2=4 0&btnP=Go
:)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Sub
Or try froogle:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=dvi+video+car
As for a recommended card, I wouldn't know.
If you plan to keep running Vista, then you are going to need some 3d capabilities if you want to run the fancy Aero interface.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Rangesearch.asp? SubCategory=48&CNP_DisplayType=2&GASearch=3
Just check what bus and the number of DVI ports you need, and sort it by ascending price.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Search for Video cards, with DVI, that cost under $50. Voila! About 1000 cheap GeForce models, most even fanless.
Next?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
From what I can tell, you've just asked an impossible 'Ask Slashdot' question. I don't think anyone here will be able to answer it for you.
Alternately, you can go to Google, click the 'more' button and select Froogle, then search for 'DVI video card'.
This guy's the limit!
That's a shame, I'd recommend my Radeon 9250 which was dirt cheap, fanless and even has a pretty clear VGA output, but it's AGP.
Last time I needed a "cheap" secondary video card, instead of spending $50 or so on a new card, I just asked around.
If you read Slashdot, chances are you've got a few friends (yourself included) who have a box of old hardware they aren't using but won't throw away.
I needed a PCI 2D only card for a secondary monitor and got it free after just a couple emails.
There's a ton of cards for $20-40 as noted by others in this thread, and there's an even cheaper option.
2 E16814999901
Get a VGA (male) to DVI (female) adapter for $3ish.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
Moral of the story: don't look for parts at big box stores. You're paying 400% or more the suggested retail on any video card you look at.
What's keeping you from doing that today ? There's plenty of cheap graphics cards out there (they may all say that they're "3D" cards, but the cheap versions are way too slow in this area to be useful). You don't even need to get the latest generation of cheap-ass cards, since the ones from two generations ago may already have been available in PCIe/PEG flavors.
ATI X300/X1300, Geforce 6200/7300GS, whatever is cheapest.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16814241001R
20 dollars, free shipping, PCI card (you don't specify AGP or PCI), DVI port.
Plus, is this some kind of anti-PC troll? Gaming graphics cards certainly can be 300 dollars or more but there is never, ever any need to buy anything over 100 or so. A Geforce 7600 for 90 dollars should play any game that's out right now at a reasonable resolution/framerate and above-minimum graphics settings. The downside is that you'll probably want to replace it in two years (versus 3 years for a 300 dollar card) if you want to play every game out in 2009 - and bear in mind that only a few games will push it even then, and you can always wait.
131 items in the UK, many of them crappy cards with only 32Mb memory for a few quid. This really does not warrant an Ask Slashdot.
Next, I'm going to Ask Slashdot how to pick my own nose, and possibly follow it up asking for techniques for sucking eggs.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Sounds like you have a case of improper LCD calibration. The auto calibration often will not properly calibrate your display on a normal desktop screen. What you should do is bring up a full screen of alternating black and white pixels and then run the auto calibration. If you do that, you'll have a display just as sharp as DVI. I do this for my gaming machine, since I use the two inputs on my monitor as a poor-man's video switch. :)
If you have an Intel chipset (915/945/965), and you have an PCIe slot, you can probably use an SDVO card (also known as ADD2+) to add a DVI port to your machine. The cards run for about $20-30. We've used a few at work, and they work pretty well.
dennis
Our company uses dual monitors on DVI connections - we upgraded all our PCs to PCI Express cards with 2 DVI ports. At the time we did this, we used XFX cards with the nVidia 6600 GPU, but they no longer seem to be available, at least from our usual vendors. At the time, they ran roughly $100 each, which was a good price for what was a decent card with dual DVI out. We didn't need 3D Gaming cards for anything in the office, and these served wondefully - they had enough oompf to make everyone happy with Google Earth and 3D Screensavers, to boot. :-)
Now, the closest you may find is the 7300, if you are looking for something current. The best bet is to look for something a bit behind the cutting edge, that a vendor wants to move out of stock. Don't buy from a brick-and-mortar shop like CompUSA, as they are usually behind in both technology and pricing (i.e. - out-of-date cards are way overpriced).
I would suggest hitting Newegg.com and using thier filters to find what specs you need, then sort by price.
$34 * 2 $133
Or he can get any of these starting at $80 before rebates if PCI is ok, these if AGP 4/8x is your game, or these if you want PCI x16.
Seriously... find your favorite online shop and run an advanced search. That's what they're there for.
I've been looking for over 15 years for this soundcard: the Innovation SSI 2001. It's an ISA-based, 6581-based soundcard. Yes, I am aware of the HardSID (I've got one), but this is about the only card missing from my soundcards collection: http://www.yvan256.net/soundcards/.
Please note, this collection is about the different technologies that came out at the beginning of the soundcards era, not the thousands of SoundBlaster clones that were available.
So, if anyone has an Innovation SSI 2001, or know where I could get one, please tell me.
I was playing CS:S with a 6800GT OC from BFG until just recently.
I just couldn't help but think about the blank look that would be on my mom's face if she had to translate that sentence into English.
Of course, she thinks that I'm a total computer guru because I know how to copy and paste.
Wait. Copy and paste?
WTF? Looking for a cheap DVI Gfx card and wanna know where to find it?
How about waking up from your koma and use this thing called internet. 15 seconds max. to find one.
Then again, the guy who put your question up needs a mental reboot aswell imho.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I had the same issue, since I've been holding back on a full rig rebuild.
I got a Sapphire X700 card. Runs in my AGP x4 slot, with both DVI and VGA outputs.
Was supercheap from Newegg.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
You can find those virtually everywhere. I work at a local computer shop, and we have PCI-E cards with DVI-out for about $60.00 CAD, and those aren't even the bottom of the barrel. AGP are also fairly cheap, though not as cheap as PCI-E any more, you'll find them for much less than even $100 CAD. Where was THIS guy looking?
Granted, if he's after PCI, he's mostly SOL.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16814127181
I installed this for a friend last month to do exactly what you need to do. AGP interface. Clear DVI output. Custom resolutions can be set, although you will have to dig deep into the settings.
I'm embarrased I even need to ask this (thusly, this post is AC) but, how do you embed your link into a word like that?
But if I copy and paste, that uses up both of my Ctrl keys. How will I open documents with Ctrl and the capital O key? Will I have to use my clicker for that again?
Get an old NVidia GEForce MX440 of ebay for $10. It can output any of the fancy schmancy resolutions out its DVI port and has hardware MPEG scaling, so its a good little card for MythTV too.
If you can find a Matrox 450 or 550 with dual DVIs, you're all set. They concentrate on 2D, not 3D. You might want to look for used cards, because they're typically $100 or more new. But they work great (excellent Linux support as well as Windows, etc) and last forever.
A lot of Dell computers ship with DMS-59 connectors and a dongle cable that breaks out to one or two VGA connectors, but it's actually dual DVI-I on the backplane. Probably all you need is a different dongle cable from Dell or eBay that breaks out to one or two DVI connectors.
froogle even
"The submitter is looking for dual dvi." Er, no, the submitter has a VGA card and wants a DVI so he can run dual screens. He never said anything about dual DVI.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Note: I -love- my GeForce 6600GT
... using an nVidia graphics card?
Tom Forsyth has posted about the lack of quality in nVidia cards this back in 2006
Title: VGA was good enough for my grandfather
I keep having this stupid conversation with people. It goes a little something like this:
Them: I need to get a new card - one with dual-DVI. Any ideas?
Me: You really need dual DVI?
Them: Yeah, VGA's shit.
Me: VGA's actually pretty good you know - are you running at some sort of crazy res?
Them: Yeah - 1600x1200 - it's a blurry mess.
Me: That's not crazy at all. It's well within VGA's capabilities.
Them: No, analogue is crap for anything like that. You have to go digital. Especially if you're reading text.
Me: Dude, at home I run an Iiyama 21-inch CRT at 1600x1200 at 85Hz on a VGA cable. I can write code all day with black text on white backgrounds. At work I run my second Samsung 213T off a VGA cable as well, and that's the screen I use for email - black on white again. They're both crystal-sharp.
Them: Rubbish. I just tried it myself - it's an unreadable blurry mess at even 60Hz.
Me: Are you by any chance
Them: Sure, but what's that go to do with it? Have you got some ninja bastard card?
Me: An elderly and perfectly standard Radeon 9700.
Them: I've got a 7800 GT - it should kick the shit out of that.
Me: Yes, at shuffling pixels. But it's got an nVidia RAMDAC. Which is a large steaming pile of poo.
Seriously - what the hell is up with nVidia and their RAMDACs? They've been shit right from day one in the NV1, they were shit when I worked at 3Dlabs and the $50 Permedia2 had an infinitely superior display quality to their top-end GeForce2s, and they've continued that grand tradition right up to current cards. That was acceptable when a RivaTNT cost $50, but now they're asking $1000 for an SLI rig. My boss was trying to get two monitors hooked up to a fancy nVidia card that only had one DVI port on it, and whichever monitor he plugged into the VGA port was ghosting like crazy. Swap the card out for a cheap no-frills Radeon X300 and hey - lovely picture on both.
Now you're going to think I'm an ATI fanboi. And I am, because I like elegant orthogonal hardware. But I'm not syaing ATI RAMDACs are great - it's just that they don't suck. Matrox, 3Dlabs and Intel all have decent RAMDACs. Even the S3 and PowerVR zombies have better RAMDACs. Beaten by S3! That's absurd.
For example, a colleague had a high-spec "desktop replacement" laptop with an nVidia chipset of some sort that he could never get to drive his cheap CRT with half-readable text. Naturally he blamed the monitor. He's recently replaced it with a new Dell 700m, and it drives the CRT wonderfully. This is a $5 Intel graphics chip in a laptop! It's totally worthless as a 3D card, but even it does orders of magnitude better than the nVidia cards at running a CRT.
The one time nVidia cards have decent RAMDACs is when it's by someone else. Some of their "multi media" cards with the fancy TV in/out stuff have a nice external RAMDAC made by someone else, and apparently (never tried them myself) they work just fine. I'm all for new tech, but we've all been bounced into switching to DVI has for such bogus reasons - monitor sizes just aren't growing that fast.
So if someone tells you that old steam-powered analogue VGA is totally obsolete because DVI quality is just sooooo much better, ask them if they've got an nVidia graphics card.
I get non-Mac related computer hardware from an outfit in Texas called Directron. I have order from them probably two dozen times over the past five years for everything from OEM copies of WinXP to cables to all the necessary hardware to build my own PC. Their customer service, and the overall shopping experience for me in fact, has always been excellent and they have a nice selection of products (especially I note when it comes to video cards)
Another place I buy from is Provantage, though I'll admit I mostly bought "complete" products like bluetooth headsets, printers and the like. I have only ordered parts (i.e., video cards, motherboards, cpus, etc.) once or twice. Again, though the overall shopping experience was excellent.
I have found both of these companeis to be competitive on price, and, if I have found a product slightly cheaper through buy.com, froogle or the like, I have tended to still order from these vendors because my customer service experience with them has been excellent.
Harvard undergrad, right? Paste is next semester.
...is an issue too.
In my limited experience, fuzzy VGA has always been caused by cheap cables or a cheap KVM in the middle. You want the kind with a choke on the end near the monitor (that 3/4 inch cylindrical thing) and the cable itself should 1/4 diameter, any less and it doesn't have room for proper shielding. Final thing is to keep the length down. 1m if possible, never more than 2m. If you have a KVM, try connecting your monitor w/o it and if the improvement is noticeable get a better KVM.
As others have said, calibrate the LCD with the proper test pattern, make sure you are running at native resolution, also check lighting and glare conditions...this lets you turn down the brightness a bit and reduces eye strain, another source of blurriness.
Based on the domain attached to his name he probably has something to do with this "sports" stuff and is most likely a fish out of water reading and especially posting on this site.
The slashdot editor that approved it is still laughing at the "story" and all of us reading it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Quit giving the guy such a hard time. It's a reasonable question. Anybody can check NewEgg, but what's the optimal choice? What's cheap, provides the most bang for the buck, is reliable, well supported by good drivers on multiple operating systems, etc.?
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Depending on the model, you may not even have an expansion slot for a video card. I've had coworkers get burned by this problem with big-name PCs lately...
seven two six five
seven four six one seven
two six four two e
I lucked out, one of the stores I asked sold me a second-hand 128MB Geforce FX5200 for AU$20 (about US$11).
Let me get this straight.. you need an AGP video card with a DVI output?
That qualifies for virtually every video card that you can actually PURCHASE NEW right about now. My GF6200 has DVI, my Radeon 9550, 9600, have DVI. All are the extreme bottom of the line right now.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Okay, a lot of people are coming down hard on the OP, but I sympathize a bit as I was in a similar situation. A year ago, I wanted to upgrade to dual-head DVI on a reasonable budget, but found it to be impossible. Not because 19" DVI monitors are expensive, but because there was simply no video card was available that had:
* Dual head
* DVI on each head
* An nVidia-based GPU
* AGP 4x/8x
* A low price
None fit this criteria. But there's really no good reason why. Inexpensive single-head DVI cards have been around for ages. So have inexpensive dual-head analog cards. But for some reason, every manufacturer assumes that every one of their customers who wants dual-head DVI with nvidia chipset is looking for a multi-hundred-dollar gaming card.
The best option at the time would have cost me $160. I don't play computer games, so I have no need for thirteen-gazillion polygons-per-second k-rad gaming card. I just wanted decent good-looking DVI video from a chipset manufacturer that I trust. (Yes, having an nVidia card is important as their drivers are good and occasionally I have a need for *some* 3D capabilities.) Even now, there's only one card that comes close on newegg, but it's still $90.
I ended up settling for a $40 GeForce FX somethingorother and two analog monitors just to stay within budget. I wish I hadn't, because the second video port on the card has uncorrectable color issues, meaning I can only do graphics work on one screen.
Maybe one day, an nVidia manufacturer will create an affordable dual-DVI card. Today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.
You can also paste with Shift+Insert, leaving one of those precious control keys free. This does mean that you can't use that shift key for the capital 'O', but you still have the other shift key. Or even caps lock!
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