Easiest card for 3 monitors on 10.6.8?

[Catahula]

I've been using GeForce 210 (silent) cards from ASUS. Low power, low cost, basic graphics. I don't need spectacular graphics, but I'd like to have three monitors. With 10.6.8 in mind, what are the best choices, keeping in mind easy install, low cost, etc? I'll likely never go past 10.6.8, as I need compatibility with older apps.

 

[bonefish]

I have a 10.6.7 with three monitors for quite a while running on:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3104

that is:
1 x monitor via DVI->DVI
1 x monitor via HDMI->DVI
1 x monitor via VGA->VGA

also, I see that this card is cheap now to get second hand, so maybe this is something you're looking for?

 

[Catahula]

Interesting. I'm using Z68 motherboards with i5 processors. Did you stay with 10.6.7 to keep compatibility with that 9800 graphics card? I wonder if 10.6.7 will work well with Sandy Bridge boards and processors?

 

[totenkopf4]

Interesting. I'm using Z68 motherboards with i5 processors. Did you stay with 10.6.7 to keep compatibility with that 9800 graphics card? I wonder if 10.6.7 will work well with Sandy Bridge boards and processors?

Catahula

As to the question will 10.6.7 work well w Sandy Bridge boards and processors - yes if you use a dsdt file w a complementary BIOS and use the program Update Helper which is needed for Sandy Bridge CPU's.

Also you should look for a CPU w HD 3000 or higher gfx not one of the HD2000 or HD2500 low end units.

As to getting 3 Monitors working - its rather easy for nVidia cards to have two ports working its tricky to get 3
Do make sure they are DVI (digital) not much luck w VGA unless you tweet the gfx card bios and add some code values to be injected into Chimera - Chameleon..

If you get the HD3000 on CPU and the MB supports on board GFX you can get that working,

A lot of users have better luck w ATI cards and 3 Active ports.

Suggest you look at this site for some info....http://legacy.tonymacx86.com/wiki/index.php/Graphics_Card_Database

 

[bonefish]

Interesting. I'm using Z68 motherboards with i5 processors. Did you stay with 10.6.7 to keep compatibility with that 9800 graphics card? I wonder if 10.6.7 will work well with Sandy Bridge boards and processors?

Nope, I'm just too lazy to do the update to something new since this works perfectly for all my needs (for this computer), but I thought that you want something for the Snow Leopard? (this is not my only mac or hack, I have three that are on 10.7.5 and two on 10.8.2 - therefor I don't have a need to update every single one all the time ) ).

But thinking about it, this one probably wont work on all three monitors update to Lion or ML, as VGA is not nicely supported in 10.7 or newer.

If 10.7 or 10.8 is in question for 3 monitors, I would probably opt for GT 640, it's natively supported and relatively cheap - but this is something based on the readings on this forum, not something that I personally tested.

to be more precise, this one:
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4255#ov
2xDVI + 1xHDMI + (non-usable) 1xVGA

 

[totenkopf4]

Interesting. I'm using Z68 motherboards with i5 processors. Did you stay with 10.6.7 to keep compatibility with that 9800 graphics card? I wonder if 10.6.7 will work well with Sandy Bridge boards and processors?

Catahula

Bonefish comments need to be clarified - if your planing to stay on the older OSX Snow Leopard for what you need to do - which your hardware is fine with - you should know that a lot of the newer video cards like the Nvidia GT 640 that bonefish make reference to have not been tested on the older OSX 10.6 X version and even though Nvidia has release newer drivers for these cards for OSX they ( the drivers / kexts) have not been tested on the older OSX 10.6 versions and We (the TonyMacx86 community ) have not really tested these w OSX SL.
At least from what I have seen / heard.

So do be careful when you thinking about the newer nVidia chipsets and using the older OSX 10.6.