What video card will do this for me?

Both of my eVga 8600GT's are not working out here. So I'm looking to stay away from nVidia right now.

I have a 24" widescreen CRT monitor (Sony GDM-FW9010) with VGA and DVI-I inputs.

I also have a digital projector with HDMI inputs.

I'd like to have both displays show the same thing at the same time. "Clone View", basically. So two desktops, two taskbars, etc etc.

BUT.... I need to be able to configure each display independently from each other. Because I want the Sony CRT at an oddball resolution/refresh rate and the digital projector at a solid 1280x720/60.

The nVidia 8XXX series won't do this for me. It won't even display 1280x720/60 on my AE700 (known issue, see the forums).

What do you guys recommend? Is it time to buy ATI again? I haven't had ATI in about seven years.

BUDGET: $80 to $140.

Found one!!

Well I found it locally. I just need to see if the guy still has it for sale or not. It's an ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB PCIe x16. And this quote below is from the details of it:

You were right. It does it in extended desktop mode only. Not in Clone mode.

At least I'm now able to view 1280x720 on my projector via HDMI now. The nVidia 8600GT wouldn't do that for me.

But I'm not overly happy yet. The ATI driver installation wasn't that great. The first install crashed so I had to re-install all over again. Also, the Catalyst software isn't anymore user-friendly than nVidia's was.

And I had MASSIVE combing right out of the box. I had to do some searching on the net to figure out how to get rid of it. There are still some odd artifacts though. And the image just isn't as clean as it was on the 8600GT. Not a huge difference though. Just slightly noticeable.

Maybe I'll look into whether I can run two video cards at the same time. One for each display.

walford, you were right. Though I assumed as much from the start, after reading your post I decided to at least try it. The Operating System did in fact disable the 2nd video card. Oh, it installed drivers for it on bootup for the first time, but the control panel never showed up nor would I get any video no matter the resolution.

So I then took my two nVidia 8600GT cards and put them both in. And sure enough it worked. But NOT like I'd hoped. In this configuration, the ability to "clone" your desktop is removed. You can only extend your desktop.

So I said the heck with it all and I formatted & re-installed the OS and I am using only the ATI right now. I'm unable to get different resolutions in cloning still, but this time it came up without any tearing at all and the video looks a bit better than last time when I installed it on top of the nVidia drivers.

I'll keep an eye out for another solution though. One that gives me cloning AND the ability for seperate resolutions!

That may be your definition, but as far as I'm concerned it's the industry's definition only because they have not put out the effort to provide cloning with the abilities it should be offered with.

The cloning we are given now is not much better than having a VGA or other video "splitter", IMO.