What are these ports? (Nvidia + Mercury)
 

I'm eying the Nvidia cards to take advantage of the Mercury playback engine. Can someone first tell me what the two identical slots are on this? Quadro FX 3800 (click on "Additional views").

Also it says that multiple monitors can be used with the video card, but all I see is the one DVI out. Is that what the other 2 are for? I guess I must have been asleep when these plug types came out because they don't look like VGA or DVI.

Can I use multiple monitors with this card? If so, how?

Thanks!

Those are "Display Port" connectors.
You can purchase Display Port to HDMI connectors (converter cables) that allow you to plug into any HDMI based monitor.
The configuration I use is DVI out to my system monitor, and the display port>HDMI out to an HDTV monitor for full screen overlay of the video preview from PPro.

The Specifications tab identifies them as DisplayPort. You'd need an adapter to go to HDMI. [Edit: D'oh! Robert types faster than I do.]

But why waste money on this card when there are better, cheaper alternatives? A GTX 480 is half the price with double the performance. And it has two DVI out ports plus HDMI.

All it takes is a minor text tweak in a file to make this card work with MPE acceleration until Adobe officially supports it later this year (so we are told). See the thread in this forum for instructions.

Great. Thanks.

Can it be used as a traditional second monitor setup? I mean, can it be used to extend your desktop? (2 monitors showing 2 different things)?

Is the GTX 480 capable of working with Mercury? I read the 3800 was the cheapest route. Am I wrong?

The *cheapest* route would have been the GTX 285, but they are discontinued and hard to find. The software tweak detailed in this forum explains how to make MPE work with virtually all 200 and 400 cards. And I can't imagine it wouldn't work to span the monitors -- every other card with ports like this that I've had does so with no problem. Usually you can only use two of the three ports at once.

I have the FX 3800 in my HP Z800 and a GTS 260 (216 core version) in my home workstation. One of the benefits to the FX 3800 is the Display Port connections can display 10 bit - something important for me. For the money, the GTS 260 216 core version is the best performance per dollar. Also, the GTX 480 requires a very powerful power supply as it can draw about 200 watts under load. Furthermore, current test results by Harm, me and some others show that Adobe and MPE hardware acceleration is not utilizing all 480 cores on the GTX 480. Harm uses a GTX 480 and his numbers aren't far off from mine.

Btw, I tested a 9800GT 1GB (112 cores) and a GTX 275 (240 cores) prior to buying the GTS 260. The 9800GT was about $100 and was quite a bit slower than the GTX 275, which was $220. The GTS 260's numbers are close enough to the GTX 275 and is $50 less.

Very good point re the power requirement on the GTX 480.
I went with the FX 3800 for that reason- I wasn't very confidant that I had the extra 200 watts for the 480.
It's interesting to hear that there is not much performance difference b/t the two re MPE.

Lloyd,
I'm kinda in the same boat. I would like to add a second monitor but had no idea what those other ports were. I'm going to try this adapter:

DisplayPort to HDMI Video Adapter Converter - StarTech.com

Art