3 monitors one fx card?

bomber456 · 18 Sep 2006 at 13:27

hi, at the moment i have a ATI 1900xt which has 2 DVI ports. To that i have linked up a 913N samsung 19" TFT and a 26" Acer HDTV.
im thinking about getting rid of the 19" tft and replacing it with 2 x 20.1" widescreen monitors and still keep the 26" connected.
i dont need the 26" on all the time except for movies etc. so would getting some kind of DVI KVM box work, so when i want to use the 26" i just swich over to it and turn one of the 20.1"'s off? or is there another way, i don;t really want to get another graphics card as it would be a bit expensive.

Cheers.

fobose · 18 Sep 2006 at 16:43

Not sure about the KVM DVI box, I am sure there are something like that about though. You could buy a cheap PCI graphics card (preferably same brand as your current one) and have the extra connection that way. ATi PCI cards seem a lot cheaper than nVidia ones

bomber456 · 18 Sep 2006 at 17:47

would i need another 1900xt to put in my second pci-express slot? or could i get a cheaper one? i know they wouldn;t beable to do crossfire.

thanks.

fobose · 18 Sep 2006 at 18:04

I'm not sure if you can have 2 cards in each pci-e slots but you should be able to put a one of these PCI cards in your PCI slot:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ATI_PCI_Series.html

McDaniel · 18 Sep 2006 at 20:15

you can put a cheaper one in a standard PCI slot (pref ATI to stop any Driver issues) its how i power 3

bomber456 · 18 Sep 2006 at 22:15

so if i got the "HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon 9250SE 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI" and put it in my pci slot, i can run my 26" HDTV with that? would it be powerfull enough?
there any more powerful ones? or cant i just stick a better one in the pci-e slot?

Thanks.

Cyber-Mav · 19 Sep 2006 at 18:19

sounds like a good excuse to go x1900xt crossfire

fobose · 19 Sep 2006 at 18:31

Can you have multiple monitors with crossfire? As you cant with Sli.

b0rn2sk8 · 22 Sep 2006 at 02:51

You CAN have two different cards in each PCI-e slot without having to do the whole crossfire / SLI thing.

I am currently running a 7800GTX powering my main 20" widescreen (NEC GX2) and iv got a 6200 turbo cache cheepy powering my 17" side screen.

Just get yourself the cheepest PCI-e card and slot it in your spair pci-e slot.
All of the cheep ones with be able to do 12x7 res easy and there are a few cheep HDMI ones out there if your into that sort of thing....

bomber456 · 22 Sep 2006 at 09:19

oh cool, cheers for that, i'd prefer to get another pci-e one, as theres hardly any room to fit another pci card in. and it would be more powerful.

cheers.