Cheapest gfx for low-res 3 screen gaming

[agentsmith]

Long time since I posted here so please be gentle

Gotta build a cheap PC with my son for a Yr4 school project, so I thought it'd be an ideal time to upgrade my graphics card

Current card is a 4850 iirc, motherboard is a 755 with single pci-e x16, 8gb ddr3 and a Core2 Quad 9400 and a fairly high quality 750w psu

My requirement for a card is to support 3 screens, 2 x 1280x1024 and a central 1440x900, all with a mixture of DVI and VGA inputs. Want to play mainly RSRBR12 so it's nothing too taxing. Don't want to spend loads as I'm facing redundancy in March

Can any of these cheapish nVidia (thinking GT-520) or ATi equivalent support this setup, i.e.
LeftLCD=DVI>DVI
MidLCD=HDMI>DVI
RightLCD=VGA>VGA

I'm so far behind on modern gpu tech that I've no idea where to start!

Many thanks in advance

 

[agentsmith]

ok, I may have found the answer myself...

Ati "Eyefinity" seems to support 3 (or more) displays from 1 slot

Anyone had experience (good or bad) with Eyefinity?

 

[TheMorningStar]

You want to be looking at AMD (ATI) for 3 screen gaming.

Only the 7 series supports mismatched resolutions I think, but I'm not 100% on that.

the lowest card you can viable do this on would be a 5770/6770, again I think.

The lower cards could probably do this but they just wouldn't have the power.

As far as monitor support goes you will need an adapter or two for the miniDP port to vga etc, you can get them on the bay for about £5 each.

 

[bridder]

There was a thread recently re peoples experiences with eyefinity here, that nVidia card will not do multimonitor gaming, in fact nearly all nVidia solutions require 2 graphics cards, although I have read a review on HardOCP recently, the Galaxy 580 MDT that will do three screens by itself. For AMD eyefinity you would probably be able to do 3 screen gaming on lowish settings with those three monitors but you'll need an active display port adapter to go with the single HD6850, as far as I am aware you will need to have them all with the same resolution though! There is a 2GB version just now for £149 here or you could take a gamble that 1GB will be enough with reduced settings for £102 here, hope that helps,

J.

 

[ALXAndy]

OK. Stock cards that support surround..

GTX 295 dual PCB

GTX 590

However, some manus (KFA2 specifically) do make cards that can run surround alone. The problem is they're all like 560 Ti and stuff and they're not going to be powerful enough.

You also need to buy the cables and adapters, so figure in £50 or so for all of those. And 1gb VRAM is not enough from my experience.

 

[agentsmith]

Thanks for the input guys, looking at the numbers and the spec of my current screens I may have to think again, maybe smuggle a couple more 1440x900 screens home!

 

[bridder]

Honesty ALXAndy I think it would be enough (I'm thinking 560ti from your post), it obviously depends on your requirements re image quality settings but given the very low resolutions that the OP is considering I think even a 1GB 6850 may do it, but certainly the 2GB one at £149 could. I've a 2GB 6950 and I honestly wasn't expecting much at 5760x1200 but I'm using 2x MSAA on Dirt2 and Grid and MLAA on Deus Ex HR and they are running fine on medium settings with some on high...

I do realise that some sacrifice has to be made to accomodate the massive resolutions, but if eye candy is your thing and you do not want to sacrifice you could just choose to play the more modern games just on a single monitor, just a thought and my 2p worth...

J.

 

[ALXAndy]

Thanks for the input guys, looking at the numbers and the spec of my current screens I may have to think again, maybe smuggle a couple more 1440x900 screens home!

Go for something sensible and you may just wing it.

Pick three 1080p monitors and you deserve to be LOLed at.

Up until two days ago I was running 295 single PCB Quad SLI on 4098x768 (3 x 1366x768) and when it worked it worked well.

Sadly, however, due to having to rely on Quad SLI support (1%) and Surround support (which failed to detect the correct resolution of my monitors in any 28x or 29x driver version I may add) it just got on my nerves.

Too much heat, poor performance (most games just went durrrr, what's that? when presented with more than one GPU) and so on.

So Eyefinity (which is also far from perfect for numerous reasons) is the way to go IMO. Personally though I would wait for a cheap 7 series Radeon.

I know I read about how it fixes numerous stupid things with Eyefinity (surround suffers the same). Basically Windows has this big problem with combining three displays. So, AMD and Nvidia just used a bodge to make them appear as two displays, then mash them into one. It's far from ideal, as your start button is all the way over on the left screen and you either need a mouse pointer speed twitchier than a schizophrenic smoke alarm or you need arms the size of Mike Tyson.

Apparently the 7 series fixes all of this according to AMD, they allow you to have your center screen as the main window and the other two as side extensions. This could simply be better drivers, or an actual hardware function of the 7 series.

You also can't snap anything to grids on three screens the old way. So that means if you maximise your browser it stretches over three screens. It really is rather clumsy and dumbitty.

That meant I could not live with it as a day to day desktop as it's quite frankly hideous.

And then you get to the games. Most, again, go "DURRR what's that?" when you offer them three screens, so inevitably need a lot of config hacking. And even then they're still broken in certain elements (Fallout 3 Science hack screens are just buggered, as are the lockpick and sniper rifle zoom screens).

Think long and hard before you do it mush, and for crying out loud don't throw hundreds of pounds at it.

 

[agentsmith]

I certainly won't be throwing 100's at it, but thanks for the warning.

I reckon the 2GB 6850 looks favourite for now. I'll take a look and see if there's any going cheap in the forum before trying to convince the missus I really NEED to spend £149 this close to Christmas!

We're closing our office down (stupid Icelandic Banking crash! ) so I'll have plenty of time to use it once I got it set up right

 

[ALXAndy]

I would try for (and this goes against every sinew of my being) a 5770 Crossfire or above set up. I mean hey, if you can find a half decent driver then you may be able to wing it for £100.

There have been loads of 5870s on AVforums recently, and again, those are still quite muscular cards.

With a budget like yours I would 100% go second hand, with warranty if possible. There's a 5870 VaporX on there right now for about £120.

 

[agentsmith]

@ALXAndy Sorry, my dirt cheap mobo [Asus P5G41T-M LX G41] only has 1 PCI-E x16 slot. I'd jump at a dual card set-up otherwise, but then why bother on a Socket 775, better to go i5-something, but then a cheap school project suddenly gets to be a £3-400 major upgrade!

 

[ALXAndy]

Yeah and that's how it ends up.

My quad SLI system began in a 790i machine with a Core 2 Duo. Sadly the Core 2 was choking it, so it ended up as an overclocked I7 Alienware

Thankfully I got that for absolute peanuts, so it was worth doing any way.

 

[Final8y]

Go for something sensible and you may just wing it.

Pick three 1080p monitors and you deserve to be LOLed at.

Up until two days ago I was running 295 single PCB Quad SLI on 4098x768 (3 x 1366x768) and when it worked it worked well.

Sadly, however, due to having to rely on Quad SLI support (1%) and Surround support (which failed to detect the correct resolution of my monitors in any 28x or 29x driver version I may add) it just got on my nerves.

Too much heat, poor performance (most games just went durrrr, what's that? when presented with more than one GPU) and so on.

So Eyefinity (which is also far from perfect for numerous reasons) is the way to go IMO. Personally though I would wait for a cheap 7 series Radeon.

I know I read about how it fixes numerous stupid things with Eyefinity (surround suffers the same). Basically Windows has this big problem with combining three displays. So, AMD and Nvidia just used a bodge to make them appear as two displays, then mash them into one. It's far from ideal, as your start button is all the way over on the left screen and you either need a mouse pointer speed twitchier than a schizophrenic smoke alarm or you need arms the size of Mike Tyson.

Apparently the 7 series fixes all of this according to AMD, they allow you to have your center screen as the main window and the other two as side extensions. This could simply be better drivers, or an actual hardware function of the 7 series.

You also can't snap anything to grids on three screens the old way. So that means if you maximise your browser it stretches over three screens. It really is rather clumsy and dumbitty.

That meant I could not live with it as a day to day desktop as it's quite frankly hideous.

And then you get to the games. Most, again, go "DURRR what's that?" when you offer them three screens, so inevitably need a lot of config hacking. And even then they're still broken in certain elements (Fallout 3 Science hack screens are just buggered, as are the lockpick and sniper rifle zoom screens).

Think long and hard before you do it mush, and for crying out loud don't throw hundreds of pounds at it.

Its only a key combo or mouse click to go from Eyefinity to Extended desktop.

 

[brigzilla]

Ive started using eyefinity today as a matter of fact, I bought these monitors when the 4870's first came out and never used them for more than a big desktop, there really are no problems setting them up to work as an extended desktop. If you are going an eyefinity route, make sure you have monitors that have thin bezels. My samsungs have nearly an inch at each side which is definately visible when you put two next to each other.

Im running all three from my primary GPU and they handle most games fine in ultra at 3840*1080.

 

[ALXAndy]

Its only a key combo or mouse click to go from Eyefinity to Extended desktop.

Yeah I expected it to be a lot better tbh. Surround is just all broken.

 

[MeMeMeMe]

Apparently the 7 series fixes all of this according to AMD, they allow you to have your center screen as the main window and the other two as side extensions. This could simply be better drivers, or an actual hardware function of the 7 series.

It's software - a feature of the February Catalyst drivers, and will be available to any hardware capable of running eyefinity.

You also can't snap anything to grids on three screens the old way. So that means if you maximise your browser it stretches over three screens. It really is rather clumsy and dumbitty.

Yeah, this irritated me. I had an eyefinity profile and extended profile set up, and switched between them with a hotkey (and also had RadeonPro to start up the eyefinity profile automatically when gaming and switch it off afterwards). This works very well, except that when switching from eyefinity to extended, the order of monitors changes so document windows you had open before gaming jump about irritatingly.

I'm currently in eyefinity mode 100% of the time, using a piece of software called Winsplit Revolution, which allows you to define grids that programs can be sent to, via hotkeys. So you can get the functionality of the WIN+arrow keys and more, to work properly with 3 monitors.
I tried AMD's hydravision first but found that erratic.

And then you get to the games. Most, again, go "DURRR what's that?" when you offer them three screens, so inevitably need a lot of config hacking. And even then they're still broken in certain elements (Fallout 3 Science hack screens are just buggered, as are the lockpick and sniper rifle zoom screens).

The vast majority of games I've tried have worked well, except for one problem: the HUD is spread over 3 monitors instead of the central one, so your health display miught on the far, far left, ammo counter on the far far right, or whatever. It's not ideal. But newer games like Saints Row 3 and Serious Sam BFE, Dirt 3 and even Dirt 2 I think, have the hud set up properly on the middle screen.

There are a couple of games that don't work in eyefinity (or work but not well, like Borderlands and its crazy FOV). It's easy enough to set up a profile in radeonpro so that when these games are launched they don't use eyefinity. This feature is also in the latest CCC I think.

 

[ALXAndy]

The vast majority of games I've tried have worked well, except for one problem: the HUD is spread over 3 monitors instead of the central one, so your health display miught on the far, far left, ammo counter on the far far right, or whatever.

And most of that can be adjusted/fixed by altering the FOV amounts in the cfg files for the game dude.

Borderlands? Oh aye, totally no go.

 

[Final8y]

It's software - a feature of the February Catalyst drivers, and will be available to any hardware capable of running eyefinity.




Yeah, this irritated me. I had an eyefinity profile and extended profile set up, and switched between them with a hotkey (and also had RadeonPro to start up the eyefinity profile automatically when gaming and switch it off afterwards). This works very well, except that when switching from eyefinity to extended, the order of monitors changes so document windows you had open before gaming jump about irritatingly.

You don't have to make eyefinity preset and extended preset.

As long as you had made an extended setup and then made an eyefinity group, just using the Window key and P will switch between them and keep the order.

Even though you have made presets you can still use the Window key and P way.