Recommend a video card(s)

A

archangel95

New Member
I want to have (2) 20.1" 1600x1200 displays and a 30" in the middle. I believe my video card right now is in a PCI-E slot and I have 4 or 5 PCI slots below that which are available. What's the process for setting up 3 screens? Can or Should I run 2 video cards? Is there a card which will run the 30" and the (2) 20.1" monitors?

Sorry. I'm new to these forums and I tried searching with no luck.

My machine is an HP and I have the windows 32bit XP operating system.

My thought is to run the 30" off of the pci-e slot with some card hopefully one of you will recommend and then to run the 20.1" monitors off of a pci card with dual monitor ability. Which hopefully one of you will point me in the direction of a good value.

I don't do any really heavy 3d graphics work with my computer.
 
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You won't be able to run 3 monitors on one video card. Your computer only has one PCI-E slot so you can't have multiple video cards. The max number of monitors you can have is 2. You mentioned having a PCI video card: Hardly any PCI video cards are good enough to run 2 monitors.
 
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So what should I do?

3 video cards?

I was under the impression that SLI combined the computing power of multiple cards to increase gaming performance on one monitor... This is unimportant to me. I don't do 3D games.
 
archangel95 said:
So what should I do?

3 video cards?
Click to expand...

You can't do that. I think the only logical thing to do is just get one video card and run 2 monitors off of it OR you could just upgrade to a better computer with a motherboard that supports multiple video cards :D
 
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Get a TripleHead2Go by Matrox, it will allow you to have 3 monitors from 1 DVI/VGA slot. You may also get 2 PCI video cards, to power the other monitors, that will work since you are not a gamer.

Say you have a 6200 PCIe card, id recommend getting some 6200 for PCI, otherwise you would probably have to have multiple drivers.
 
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Calibretto said:
You won't be able to run 3 monitors on one video card. Your computer only has one PCI-E slot so you can't have multiple video cards. The max number of monitors you can have is 2. You mentioned having a PCI video card: Hardly any PCI video cards are good enough to run 2 monitors.
Click to expand...

Calibretto said:
You can't do that. I think the only logical thing to do is just get one video card and run 2 monitors off of it OR you could just upgrade to a better computer with a motherboard that supports multiple video cards :D
Click to expand...

Calibretto said:
If they make such a thing, make sure you have a frickin' good video card because three monitors will use A LOT of video power.
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I just wanted to follow up on this because all of Calibretto's advice was terrible. I bought a new machine, but I didn't need to. I bought a Dell xps420 with quadcore processor. Quadcore is awesome btw. I got an EVGA 8600GT pcie for my 30" and an EVGA 6200GT pci for my 20.1". The only hiccup I ran into was that Windows Vista requires both cards to run off the same driver set so I had to find a pci card that ran off the same driver set as the 8600. It works fine and from what I've read elsewhere windows XP is not as finnicky as Vista and will run two video cards with different driver sets.
 
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