Purchasing a second monitor

Hello,

I am purchasing a second monitor for my system (to use a dual-monitor setup) and I have a couple questions. My video card is a GEForce 6800, the monitors both being Dell E173FP.

1) My 6800 has one VGA output and one DVI output, but the monitors only use VGA inputs, so I will need to use a VGA<->DVI adapter to hook the second monitor up. Will this hurt my picture quality? Do you have any recommendations on which to use?

2) Will using two monitors on the same card reduce my card's performance dramatically? I understand that most games do not support multi-monitor viewing, so playing games will likely stay on one monitor, but will using the second monitor to view things like txt files, walkthroughs, IRC and instant message programs hurt my performance? If so, will turning the 2nd monitor off restore performance?

Any tips on utilizing my dual-monitor setup to its fullest potential is appreciated! Thanks for the help!

I have a dual head setup using an BFG NVIDIA 6600GT OC along with two Samsung 193P LCDs. Both ports are DVI.

Before this, I was using an ATI Radeon 9800PRO with one DVI port and one VGA port. When the second LCD monitor was on the VGA port  I did notice a drastic loss of clarity vs. the other monitor on the DVI port. So yes, if this is any indication, you will notice it has hurt your picture quality.

Concerning performance, I've noticed with this dual-head BFG that I'm unable to play fast FPS games on the secondary monitor -- things seem to drag and skip frames. I can only play these games on the primary monitor. On the secondary monitor, however, I'm able to watch videos, anime, whatever else.. as long as the video card isn't stressing on the secondary, it's fine.

Btw, no, turning the secondary monitor off will not restore performance -- if it's connected, if it's detecting there's a monitor there, it's going to split it's load as the card is designed to split.

By the way, in post #2 I forgot to mention I'm using a Twinview setup.