One Video Card or Two? Is There a Difference?

Back up. What are you trying to accomplish?

Are you trying to run multiple monitors?

Are you needing graphics power to run CAD software?

Are you trying to build something to run game graphics?

Cards tend to split along the Gaming and CAD divide. I run the NVIDI Quadro FX 4800 1536 MB, which is a high end CAD oriented card. If I were using my machine for games it would be something else.

So you need to qualify what your purpose of the machine is first.

Yes I want to be able to run three monitors, I'm not a gamer, I do run some 3d apps, but mostly multi application....I like to run ~20 windows with several graphic apps like paint programs, music, java apps, video....all at the same time...

I was looking over some of these nvidia 4800 FX cards and there's quite a spread in price from around $350 all the way to $2200 for a nVidia Quadro FX 4800G PCI-E x16 1.5GB with a G-Sync 2 interface card...I notice the cards now come not only in the pci-e but now a 2.0 and 2.1 version...I don't know what a card could possibly do to make it worth more than I paid for my last computer...I want to hold the cost below $500. Unless the card can perform some magical feat that I am totally unaware of, I can't see it being worth any more than that....

The graphic card will unload the CPU by managing a lot of complex drawing tasks.

NVIDIA and Radion seem to be the better cards. You probably do not need the power of the 4800 unless you are doing a lot of 3D modeling and photo-realistic renderings.

http://www.cadalyst.com/hardware/graphics-cards/setting-a-cad-speed-record-14292?page_id=1

Have a look at that page and the 3 after that. It sums it up actually quite nicely. I worked in cad now from 1988 and done a lot of things, big assemblies and complicated 3d objects. The thing I would like to get to is, if you are designing and drawing stuff the manufacture, creating 3d views to represent your intentions and the real value add stuff you can get away with virtually any card. Because you are getting used to the speed of your machine so fast that one actually do not notice the difference for very long. I see this as the value add bit. If you like pretty pictures which is in my view is a waist of precious time you have to have a bigger and better card. Get something that can meet your needs and add a nodge for future.It is of no use to go over board, it only cost money.

Don't go nuts on specmanship, unless you're going to do a lot of photorealistic rendering or play multiplayer high framerate 3D realtime multiplayer games, you'll probably never max out the card(s)' performance. Do get a multicore CPU, lots of memory, and perhaps dual hard drives set up for RAID 0 or a HD/Solid State Disk (SSD) combo; that money will reward you more than buying a $500+ on the graphics card. Remember it's a system, having a wiz-bang graphics subsystem with a mediocre CPU, small RAM and slow disk access that will never supply data at a rate that can't tax the graphics card, is a waste of money. Every real system has a bottleneck, your goal is to match the performance of each subsystem.

You didn't say which manufacturer you're looking at, but many offer graphics cards that have multiple outputs (VGA, HDMI, DVI,DisplayPort or some combo). The caveat is that you may not be able use all of them or certain combinations simultaneously. My system processes constantly updating, real-time multiple data streams that get displayed on three monitors with over 100 windows computing and interacting with me. My bottleneck is the internet connection over which I have no control!

Wow that sounds good.....So I have been looking at Geforce, only because I have been using them, from the beginning and haven't ever had a problem....I am looking at the i7 processor, I haven't settled on one yet, but at least 4 cores maybe 6...probably about 8 gig RAM....The hard drives I'm a little lost on, the solid states are really expensive and I'm not sure what the benefits are beyond some other traditional types I've looked at....as you can see I'm still researching....so the RAID 0 is good?

I replaced my standard HDD with two solid state drives (one for the system and applications and the other for data).

The speed increase was very, very noticeable. I can't say how that will work for you, but worked for me.

www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firepro-v3900-review-benchmark,3153.html

Try this link out. This shows a comparison of the new firepro V3900 entry level workstation graphics card compared to Nvidia Quadro cards and also mainstream gaming cards. It takes them all through the tests with different CAD programs to show how they perform with each type of software. This could be a starting point for you because the V3900 is only around $110.