Three Monitors

[sniperchang]

I updated to the latest Nvidia driver, and the distortion is gone. I'm still disappointed with overall sluggishness in performance even for general things like moving and resizing windows, etc. But it'll be sufficient for now anyway.

hmmm, I have not experienced any sluggishness with my 6200

May I ask for your system specs?

 

[tuxify]

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/products/th2go/home.php

I seriously watched that flash animation at the top of the page for about 5 minutes.

 

[philgons]

May I ask for your system specs?

Sure thing:

• EVGA nForce 650i MotherBoard
• Intel Q6600 CPU
• 8GB (4x2GB) of 800Mhz DDR2 G.Skill RAM
• 500 Watt Antec NeoHE500 PSU
• 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 2
• 320 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 PATA
• MSI GeForce 7600GS PCI-E 256MB DDR2
• eVGA GeForce 6200 PCI 256MB DDR2
• 2 Acer 22" AL2216W Monitors (one connected to the 7200 via DVI and the other to the 7600GB via DVI)
• 1 Hanns G 28" HG281D Monitor (connected to the 7600GS via DVI)
• Lite-on 20x DVD Burner via SATA
• Vista 64-bit Home Premium

 

[philgons]

Quick follow up: with my third screen enabled (which is connected via DVI to the 6200), User Account Control in Vista takes 10+ seconds to come up!! When I disable the third monitor, UAC takes less than a second. How weird is that?!

 

[G25r8cer]

Just disable UAC anyway. Its annoying

 

[sniperchang]

Quick follow up: with my third screen enabled (which is connected via DVI to the 6200), User Account Control in Vista takes 10+ seconds to come up!! When I disable the third monitor, UAC takes less than a second. How weird is that?!

ya that is weird.

The 6200 might be struggling because of the higher resolution of the 22" monitors, compared to mine which are 17". And of course your running vista, which is a huge resource hog itself...

 

[G25r8cer]

^^ I would say it sounds like the processor is being the bottleneck and not the gpu. What proc we talking about?

 

[philgons]

^^ I would say it sounds like the processor is being the bottleneck and not the gpu. What proc we talking about?

It's not the CPU, which is a Q6600. I watch the CPU usage when it stalls, and they are very low. When I disable the third monitor connected to the 6200 video card, there's a HUGE different in the speed of UAC. We're talking 10-15 seconds compared to 1.

 

[philgons]

The 6200 might be struggling because of the higher resolution of the 22" monitors, compared to mine which are 17". And of course your running vista, which is a huge resource hog itself...

I think you might be right about the resolution, monitor size, and Vista's graphical demands. I turned the resolution way down, and things are much snappier. I didn't check to see if that fixed the UAC issue or not since I now have UAC disabled. I think I'll keep it at the full resolution though and just put up with the lag on that screen. I'll just try to use that screen for graphically non-intensive stuff.

 

[Archangel]

if I may ask, but wich monitor did you connect to wich card? (1 22" to the 6200, and the other 2 to the 7600?)

 

[philgons]

if I may ask, but wich monitor did you connect to wich card? (1 22" to the 6200, and the other 2 to the 7600?)

Yes. All three via DVI.

 

[philgons]

Two other things worth noting:

1. With all three monitors enabled, Vista has trouble coming out of standby. I never had trouble with with only two monitors.
   
2. With all three monitors enabled, I get a frequent message that the display driver kvlddmkm has stopped responding and has recovered.

 

[philgons]

Back to two monitors. I'm finding that it's not worth the problems caused by the 6200 to have three monitors. I talked my wife into connecting the extra monitor to her laptop, so all is good. Only $30 lost on the 6200, but I might be able to use it in my Windows Home Server machine that I built.

When I get around to building my next machine, I'll make sure to get a motherboard with at least 2 PCI-E slots. That will allow me to run two decent up-to-date cards and not have to worry about compatibility and/or performance issues.

Thanks for all of your help.