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Can someone recommend a cheap mac graphics card so that I can add a third monitor? I don't need any fancy 3d acceleration. I really just want to store ichat, rss feeds, and twitter on this other monitor. The computer in question is a Mac Pro (tower).

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This is impossible to answer unless you tell us which mac you want to upgrade. – Troggy♦ Feb 3 '10 at 23:34
It's a Mac Pro. – weotch Feb 4 '10 at 18:19

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I use the Gefen USB to DVI adapter (which uses the DisplayLink chip) to add a 3rd display to my MacBook Pro. It works great!

http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=4517

DisplayLink Mac drivers are here:

http://www.displaylink.com/support/mac_downloads.html

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When you do Expose effects (like showing all windows), does the framerate suffer? Or is that fine? – weotch Feb 4 '10 at 18:29
I just tried Expose and it works fine on the 3rd monitor. The latest DisplayLink drivers are much improved. You don't want to run video on the 3rd monitor and you'll notice some lag when you drag windows around quickly, but it works fine for web browsers, text editors, mail, etc. – Paul Lefebvre Feb 5 '10 at 3:17
up vote 2 down vote

To expand upon Nifle's answer (I don't have comment privileges yet)...

A USB-to-DVI adapter is a good solution if you are going to be primarily using the 3rd monitor for office type uses (email, word processing, browsing, twitter, etc). For example, gaming would not be a good use for a USB-to-DVI adapter.

Also, if you go this route you will want an adapter based on a DisplayLink chip.

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up vote 1 down vote

You could use an external USB graphics card.

A quick Google search turns up quite a lot of hits. One obvious advantage is that it's practically guaranteed to work in your next computer too.

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Wow, I didn't even know these products existed! – weotch Feb 4 '10 at 18:30

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