A week or so ago I requested some feedback from the FG readers about options for LCD monitors and a new video card.

Well, as a by-product of a new PC at the office, I have a new video card. I am using a Dell Dimension 8400 at the office now and the card it came with was an ATI Radeon x300 SE mounted on a PCI Express interface. The card is a beast with 128mb of memory, which is a big difference from the 32mb card I have been using.

One thing I have seen with this new card that I wanted some advice on is the dual output capabilities. My old card was a Matrox G400 with Dual VGA outputs. The thing I really liked about that card was that when I ran it with DualHead enabled, it literally stretched my desktop across two monitors, creating one desktop that was 2560 x 1024, rather than two seperate desktops of 1280 x 1024 each. That is what this current card seems to be doing.

This is really just nitpicking, but I kind of liked having my task bar stretched across both screen because it gave me lots of space when I had lots of programs/windows open.

Is there a way to make this ATI card do that, or is it something that is sort of exclusive to the Matrox DualHead software? I had thought about pulling the ATI card out and dropping my old Matrox back in, but it is an AGP card, and the motherboard in this new box doesn’t have an AGP slot.

The link associated with this post below goes to the product page for the ATI card. I have combed through it throroughly, but haven’t seen any mention of being able to do what I am talking about. Maybe someone else will have more luck.