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3 monitor support

KalashnikovAli

KalashnikovAli

KalashnikovAli

Associate
Joined
17 Oct 2010
Posts
64
I've got 3 Dell U2311h monitors, though only 2 of them are currently being used since my setup doesn't support 3 monitors. I didn't really plan for the third monitor, I've only got it because of a mix up by Dell.

Setup includes:
Intel i7 950 @ 4Ghz
Asus P6X58D-E Motherboard
Gigabyte GTX470

So I was going to ask whether it's best for me to get another 470 for sli or get myself an ATI card such as the 6970 which supports 3 monitors. Now..just before posting this I decided to open up my case to see if it's even possible to get two cards in there and it doesn't seem like a good idea. The 470 is a pretty chunky card, if I were to install another one the two cards would be stuck together - which would certainly lead to overheating. There is one other PCIe slot at the bottom, but there isn't enough space to fit a 470 in there due to the psu being directly underneath.

So I guess my question now is..what's the best single card that supports more than two monitors? I'd also like to game with all the screens. I tried looking for some benchmarks for a single 6970 with eyefinity, but didn't really have much luck.
From what I remember, single nVidia cards don't support more then two monitors - is that still the case?
 
I didn't really want to spend more than £300, but I could be tempted to get the 7950. Would the 7950 give decent fps with three 1080p monitors?

Also how much do you think I could sell a 470 for?
 
KalashnikovAli said:
I didn't really want to spend more than £300, but I could be tempted to get the 7950. Would the 7950 give decent fps with three 1080p monitors?
Click to expand...

It would give very good results considerably better than the 6970. It's an expensive card but there is really nothing better single card wise at the moment than a 79xx series for eyefinity.
 
The 7970 is stunning! Haven't tried a 7950 so couldn't comment on that, from reading around however it also sounds like a brilliant card.
 
The difference between the xx70 and xx50 cards isn't much in real gameplay - certainly not worth £150.
I believe AMD deliberately delayed the release of the 7950, because of what happened with the 5850/5870 and 6950/6970 releases. The xx50 and xx70 were released at the same time, and the xx50 were seen as a must-buy because it was clear the xx70 offered only a slight gain over the xx50 for a considerable increase in price.

By staggering the release, they hoped to get all those people who wanted a new card of the new tech "right now" to go 7970, rather than opt for the slightly weaker, much cheaper card.
 
Tried 3 screen gaming with GTX470 SLI and even 3x 1680x panels were running into VRAM limits too often for my liking however not sure even with the extra VRAM a single 7950 would handle it significantly better - it takes a fair bit of GPU core grunt to.
 
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