Support for ATI hardware

[justin at shiningsilence.com]

> Seeing that my primary box seems to have fried yesterday (giving me the
> excuse to get something new in the process), I was wondering how the state
> of support for ATI graphics cards is these days? I know Nvidia is
> generally preferred on OS OSes but alas, I can't find a cheap, fanless
> dual head nVidia card anywhere (I couldn't care less for 3d accelleration,
> but I hate fan noise) but plenty of ATI ones that fit the bill, cheap too.

If you aren't interested in 3D but you want multimonitor support, look for
older PCI cards.  I bought a few Radeon 7000 models from newegg.com
(Powercolor?  I forget); they had dual outputs in the back, but I couldn't
get them both to work.  However, they were cheap and PCI, so I just used
up a few slots and had 3 monitors working.

I remember reading about someone using FreeBSD and 3 ATI Radeon 7500s to
get 3D and multihead display; I haven't tried it myself.  I saw some
7000-series PCI cards on a shelf at my local CompUSA for ~$30, recently.

I would love it if there was a way to do both multimonitor and 3D, easily.
 I like the ATI 9600 Pro that I'm using now, but if, say, the NVIDIA
driver supported multiple cards and output and 3D, I'd be investing in
multiple new cards.