In case anyone still cares, the DACs in the 8500 are in fact two different speeds. The secondary display connector is tied to the TMDS and it's primary purpose would be to drive an LCD.

That said, I had two CRT displays running 2048x1152 without a problem this week on a Mac. That's a wide-screen mode. Non-wide you'd be able to still do 2048x1536 on the primary (VGA) and 1920x1080 on the secondary (DVI-I) connector. At higher resolutions, due to the slower DAC (I don't want to post the frequency now because I can't remember exactly what it is), you obviously won't be able to run at the highest refresh rates. Actually, I could do 2300x1294 on the primary with that monitor (SONY FW900).

Oh... This card will also drive IBM's new 3840x2400 panel (it only supports 15Hz when being driven by the single card). This is one hell of an amazing display. Only $18-24000 USD.

And in relation to the post that started this thread... ATI also has a very affordable (read: VERY cheaply priced) 3-port firewire card. It's 6-pin - so it is powered. Whether or not it has enough power for a specific device I can't say. I haven't tested it with an iPod. Though the card works perfectly fine in a Windows box as well as a Mac (you need to have Firewire extensions which are included with all new versions of the OS).

I meant to do this followup a few weeks ago and forgot... Sorry. Just noticed I still had the thread marked as a fav.

Bruno