Nvidia Card Peformance differences with Mecury

[Phil Hoppes]

Well yes and no. You can put a Mac Graphics card in a PC. You cannot do the reverse. Apple has specific graphic card bios entries on the graphic cards that prevent you from dropping in any graphic card which is how they restrict the hardware that runs on a Mac. I knew that the current Mac 30″ display requires a dual link DVI to drive a 2560×1600 display so you do need 2 video cards to run an additional monitor if one of them is a Mac 30″. I was not aware that there are 30″ 2560×1600 monitors that were DVI that did not require dual link.

[Tim Kolb]

“I knew that the current Mac 30″ display requires a dual link DVI to drive a 2560×1600 display so you do need 2 video cards to run an additional monitor if one of them is a Mac 30″. I was not aware that there are 30″ 2560×1600 monitors that were DVI that did not require dual link.”

I think you need to re-read my post.

All 30″ monitors need dual-link to run at full resolution (the Dell will accept nothing else but dual-link, and the Apple will accept single link, but will simply scale the resolution, though it does it quite nicely in my experience).

Once again, “dual-link” does NOT refer to two ports. It is a kind of port. Feeding a monitor “dual-link DVI” is done from one DVI port that is a dual link type…all the digital pins are active instead of those four vacant spaces on single link DVI. The QFX 4800 has two (2) dual-link DVI ports and therefore can feed two (2) 30″ monitors.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,