Triple Display System?

sniperchang

sniperchang

New Member
I have a question that will blow your mind, lol ;)

Right now I have a dual monitor system (see sig) But I'm bying a LCD monitor soon (see my other thread).

Now Both monitors are connected to my video card so that takes a bit more ressource from the card. See when I play video game, the Program Ultramon can temporary disable a monitor during playing a game (either that or I just leave the other monitor on) wich I do beleive make my video card "concentrate" on the monitor with the game running.

Say I buy a PCI video card, and connect my CRTs to that, just as "side companion" and use the lcd for heavy gaming. Would that work to make a triple display system? And when I game in my lcd monitor, will my PCIe video card be able to "concentrate" only on the game, or lcd monitor, and the PCI Video card will only be used as an extented Windows Desktop...

err that sounds complicated, I hope you get what I'm saying...

I though about this based on the knowledge that before video cards had dual DVI connector, they use to simply buy a extra PCI Video card to connect a second monitor, but only the monitor on the main video card had fastest graphic compared to the monitor on the PCI video card.
 
i'm running one monitor on a pcie x1300 pro, and the other two monitors on a pci version of said card

all 3 monitors are 20.1" 1680x1050 sceptre lcd's, and it works fine.

3 monitor gaming is out of the question, of course, but you can play on one just fine
 
I've set up machines that have had 4 video cards in them before and they worked fine. however you can only run a game on one of the monitors.
 
that's not true.

I HAVE played unreal tournament (don't remember which version) across all 4

the fram rates were just attrocious on the pci-driven monitors

but if you had two pci express cards, 3 or 4 monitor gaming would be no problem
 
well the rigs I set up were not for gaming so I didn't ever try to see how well any game would run with multiple monitors. Not to mention I don't think any game natively supports it. So, if you got it to work cool, but don't expect any support if it doesn't.
 
There's also workstation cards that support up to 4 monitors (i know ati's is called the firemv, but not sure about nvidias) which give you a lot more flexibility for tweaking your multimonitor setup vs. using seperate cards.

You can switch between multiple discrete dektops, and one gigantic desktop that stretches across all three (so the monitors appear in the display settings as one gigantic monitor, making stretching video/games across all 3 a snap) which you can't do with multiple discrete cards.

I believe the 512mb version of the firemv is ~$400, which isn't terrible if you want to go that route.
 
ya, forgot about those.

The ATI was the cheapest card with 4 outputs, i kinda forgot about the others.

I don't think any of the cards with more than 2 outputs have any sort of 3d gpu onboard, tho.....

It'd still be the way to go for a multi-monitor office machine, tho.
 
Wow that certainly got your attentions! Always fun to have a computer ridle, uh?

I think I'm just gonna get a cheap PCI card, just enough juice to run simple windows apps on the CRTs, that's what I'm really gonna use the extra monitors for, either than that, when I get the lcd, 19"wide screen for extreme gaming baby!

Any Cheap PCI card recommendations? (with two VGA connectors incase you forget, lol)
 
the pci card i use is a x1300, and was $80 open box from newegg

it's got dual dvi-a outputs, and sucks, but is fine for 2nd and 3rd monitor

i got it because the x1300 has hardware mpeg2/h264/divx decompression
 
cheap is fine, as long as you understand that the monitors hooked up to it will basically only be digital 'clipboards' for pulling up web pages/papers/running your instant messenger, etc.

I wouldn't expect to be doing very much actual work on those monitors, they'll be very, very slow.

it honestly just depends on what you need them for. If it's just for web browsing, cheap is fine.

The only reason i spent more, again, was so that i could use the secondary monitors for videos, as well as web browsing/typing.
 
heyman421 said:
cheap is fine, as long as you understand that the monitors hooked up to it will basically only be digital 'clipboards' for pulling up web pages/papers/running your instant messenger, etc.

I wouldn't expect to be doing very much actual work on those monitors, they'll be very, very slow.

it honestly just depends on what you need them for. If it's just for web browsing, cheap is fine.

The only reason i spent more, again, was so that i could use the secondary monitors for videos, as well as web browsing/typing.
Click to expand...

ok, Thanks for the Input!
 
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