3 X 24" Dell monitors with 2 X 4870X2's How do i set these up for 3 screen gaming?

XysteR

XysteR

XysteR

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I'm currently running a single 24" Dell monitor with 2 X 4870X2's in quadfire mode.

I'm looking into buying a further 2 X Dell 24" monitors and disable quadfire for 3 screen gaming. Can someone clarify how this lot is physically setup. Do i just need to disable Quadfire in CCC, remove the crossfire bridge and connect the 3 monitors up? e.g 2 monitors to the top 4870X2 and 1 monitor to the bottom 4870X2? What would happen or what can be done with the 4th card that isn't used, could it be used for any type of addition rendering?

Also i'm asuming i'll have to set the 3 monitors up in 'Display Settings'?

I normally run games in 1920X1200 but i'm a little confused how games will make use of the 4 cards and 3 monitors? Will games then show an option to run in 5760 X 1200?

Any help to clarify how this works would be greatly appreciated as its cooking my noodle lol
 
I thought you needed 5xxx series cards for eyefinity,

For the setup your looking into i dont think it would be much use.

It would work with some games, but it will not work like eyefinity does.
 
While you do need a 5 series ATI card for "Eyefinity" you can use the freeware SoftTH to output games across 3 screens...

http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/

Basically 1 card does the rendering for the full res (5760 X 1200 or whatever you want), then outputs to the centre and 1 side monitor, and passes the picture details to a 2nd gfx card to show on the other side screen. The 2nd card doesn't need to be powerful as the calculations are all done on the main one.

Disadvantages:- crossfire won't work and the 1 card has to render everything on its own - so lower frame rates. Doesn't work on all games, requires tweaking of config file sometimes.

Advantages:- it's free, doesn't need Displayport monitor(s), you can run different resolutions and even ratios across the screens (you can run lower res on the outside screens as you tend not to notice them as much).
 
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