• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Triple monitor gaming on a GTX 260

Admetos

Admetos

Admetos

Soldato
Joined
19 Jun 2009
Posts
4,045
I would like to play Battlefield Bad Company 2 over my three monitors. I'll give you a quick spec of my system.

3 x AG Neovo 1280x1024 19" screens
GTX 260 (powers centre and right)
8400 GS (powers left).
i5 750.
Non SLI board (Gigabyte P55M-UD2)

I was looking into Matox Tripple Head 2 go - however I've read a couple of comments here and elsewhere that Nvidia are releasing drivers that will allow triple gaming using 200 series cards. Can anyone confirm this info is correct?

If not am I best still looking at Matrox TrippleHead2Go?

I did look at ATI Eyefinity, however the costs involved were quite expensive.
 
Less than 1 gig memory on those 260GTX's will make playing BF2BC hard over 3 monitors due to scaling over the 3. you should get the 1 gig 460 (sell 260 for 50 or 60 quid) and add the extra £100 for a new card. You would notice the difference
 
I don't have Battlefield BC2 but my (version 1 ) GTX260 copes remarkably well with TripleHead resolutions. I can run at 3 x 1680x1050 x 2fsaa pretty well in some games, or I can drop it down to 4*** x 900 without it turning into an ugly-fest if I need a frame rate boost.

I do generally prefer to use those modes for sims though. For mainstream type games I usually stick to a single 1680x1050, so I may not be the best judge of these things.

If you can find a TripleHead unit cheap (I'm guessing a lot of people will have jumped to Eyefinity) it's certainly worth a try. But given that cheap adapters are now available it's tempting to put the money for a TH2Go towards either a 5850 or even a 5770.

Anyway, these are always tricky decisions to make. I just wanted to say that the GTX260 is still a surprisingly capable card.

Andrew McP

PS I'm presuming you've tried SoftTH on your setup? I think that needs two PCI-E cards though, because even though the second card doesnt need to be powerful, a lot of data has to be shovelled over the bus to reach it.
 
How much is a TH2G now? I would have thought ur money would be better spent on a 5850/5870 as you already have the monitors.

For Nvidia surround dont u need 2 cards in SLI?
 
Thanks for responses. I'll try and answer above.

I'm on a quad i5 750 - not overclocked. Have 8GB Ram
My GTX 260 is a 216 core version - clock defaults are GPU 576 / Memory 999 - again not overclocked
My rig is primary a development / work machine - but I picked up BC2 and i'm hooked. The graphics are so much more moved on from Detaforce Task Force Dagger!

I tried Battlefield BC2 on duel monitors (2560 x 1024) with graphics at max and to me it was totally fine, other then the gun sight down the centre! I was thinking at triple I could just drop to low/mid graphics in worst case. To be honest I was surprised how well BC2 ran on my rig.

Could someone price me up the cheapest 5870 card + the device I need to connect to 3 x DVI's? Guess i'm looking at almost £400.

As mentioned above, i've seen a few TripleHeads2Go being sold second hand, and was hoping to try and pick one up cheap.

Andrew, looked at SoftTH but no support for BC2.
 
Cheers for that, not priced that badly.

Also how does the 5850 stack up (performance) compared to the GTX 260 I own.

Noob question. How does that Sapphire Active DP physically connect to 3 DVi monitors?

EDIT. Penny drop moment - it looks like 2 monitors connect to the rear of the card in the normal way - then that cable provides the third DVI?
 
Last edited:
The 5850 performs a lot better then the 260. Yes, that adapter provides the third DVI. You need to connect that to the Displayport on the 5850.
Just a note, for triple monitor gaming for Nvidia you must use SLi, meaning another 260, as the third monitor connects to the second 260. (I may be wrong on this though... :o)
 
Orcvader said:
Just a note, for triple monitor gaming for Nvidia you must use SLi, meaning another 260, as the third monitor connects to the second 260. (I may be wrong on this though... :o)
Click to expand...

Thats right you must have 2 identical cards in sli with Nvidia for surround gaming (at the moment)
 
Thanks for everyone's input, i'm going to move over to Eyefinity. I will be able to switch out the GTX 260 and 8400GS. Given the GTX260 is stuck in 3d mode (for 2d apps) i'll save some power costs also!

For some reason I thought Eyefinity was very expensive, but I was getting confused with the 6 screen Eyefinity cards - i've not been paying to much attention to graphics cards in resent years.

Final question

Whats Eyefinity like for normal 2D work / applications. I use my rig for software development, and have Visual Studio spanned on center & right screen, and use left screen for SQL / Email etc. How does Eyefinity stack up to Nvidia in this regard?
 
You don't have to have Eyefinity on (which merges them to a single res). I have it off when I'm on the desktop, and basically does the same as what you're doing now.
 
Shame you don't have an SLI board - couple of GTX460 in SLI would give you decent 3 screen performance (unless it was silly high res) and almost definitely be a smoother experience than eyefinity - even a pair of GTX260 wouldn't be hideous tho would run out of VRAM a bit quickly on higher resolutions/amounts of AA.
 
Rroff said:
Shame you don't have an SLI board - couple of GTX460 in SLI would give you decent 3 screen performance (unless it was silly high res) and almost definitely be a smoother experience than eyefinity - even a pair of GTX260 wouldn't be hideous tho would run out of VRAM a bit quickly on higher resolutions/amounts of AA.
Click to expand...

Well he has a crossfire board, he could just upgrade to crossfire in the future. :confused: If you're saying a pair of GTX260s would be fine, why is eyefinity going to be not as smooth? :confused:
 
Yes shame it's not an SLI board, as could have just picked up another GTX 260. I have a second graphics port (currently running 8400GS), but definitely has to be SLI and can't sit independent?

Orcvader said:
You don't have to have Eyefinity on (which merges them to a single res). I have it off when I'm on the desktop, and basically does the same as what you're doing now.
Click to expand...

Can you group two monitors together (group center and right) into one large display. I run Visual Studio spanned on these you see. And leave the left monitor on stock size.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom