Horizontal synch problems on my secondary video card

[Wills]

My Windows desktop is spread over 3 screens - 2 from my main card, PCIe x16 ATI X1950XTX, and my 3rd desktop from a PCI ATI 9250 (512 Meg and 128 Meg respectively).

This third card is only used when I'm next door in the living room - I use it for watching media. The quality is great, but I'm having some pan/shimmer problems (and it's exactly the same on my desktop monitor when I hook it up - so it's not the TV or the cable).

By Pan/Shimmer I mean a problem with the image when the camera pans. I guess a pan requires much more processing from a graphics point of view, and it might be just down to the speed of the PCI graphics card, but is there anything I can do to help this?

Vertical Pans don't seem to matter (as long as it's not too quick) but it's the horizontal pans that really cause the problem.

It's not even a stutter or anything - it's a momentary flicker or mis-alignment of lines that perhaps aren't processed at precisely the same moment.

Anyone got any ideas? I'm using the latest version of both xvid and divx, and it's not nearly so marked (if it even exists) on my main two monitors (it would seem the GPU unit there is much faster). I've never seen it happen before on any other PCs but then again I haven't put a graphics signal through a PCI bus before for many many years!

It's running at 1024x768 (which is all the TV will support) and I've tried it at lower resolutions and it still happens.

Help! (it's not un-watchable, just irritating)
Thanks.

[Krispy Kritter]

Assumming you see the same issues when playing the video back on your primary display, the problem sounds like low quality avi/divx files. Its typical for 700MB movies to exhibit the symptoms you are seeing, especially during action sequences or scenes with movement.

[Wills]

No, these issues are only on the PCI card and they affect low and high quality xvid and divx alike.

[Bjs]

Have a look at this : http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/Monitor.php

This give's you a good view point about the difference's between crt and lcd ... worth a note .

From a couple of points :

1: Where is pci card (it must not be in pci next to agp ... these share m/b resources , which can cause conflicts)
2: Have you tried pci in another slot ?
3: Flicker can be caused by the wrong frequency output used on pci vga card .

2 cards and 3 displays is going to be very taxing on any system ... very handy for monitory purpose's ... it also dosent help when using non-matching video chipset's ...

Poor quality in xvid / divx would indicate a worthy investigation of checking to see if updated video drivers for pci unit are available online .