3 X Monitor Setup

1kiwi · 2 Feb 2012 at 19:19

Hi Guys,

I recently purchased a 30" Dell and I want to add 2 X 19" monitors in portrait mode on each side of the Dell. I have a GTX480 however I'm planning to upgrade in the future (it's fine for gaming at present).

The 2 X 19" monitors are mainly for work, development. My question is, what do I need to support this many monitors. A secondary question is that I have a new Lenovo T410 that I would like to use in this setup. It has a display port, although I'm not sure if it's powerful to project a shared desktop given the res???

Any advice from someone who has put together a setup as above would be much appreciated.

cmndr_andi · 2 Feb 2012 at 19:28

Hi there,

With a GTX 480 you will need a second graphics card to run more than two monitors. Since it is for work then a cheap nvidia card (so there are no driver conflicts) like the GT 520 or GT 430 would be a good bet.

As for running your laptop with many monitors - I think you shouldn't have much problem running two external displays (Displayport + VGA) but any more than that would be very difficult since one of the monitors you are running is such high resolution (2560x1600).

Axeia · 2 Feb 2012 at 20:04

Displayport will do a 2560x1440 res, don't quite understand what you mean with "project a shared desktop" but any 2d work will work on any video card no problem, videoplayback etc should be fine as well.

1kiwi · 2 Feb 2012 at 20:22

Thanks guys. I think with the 3007 I'm quite limited. Reading around I think I need one of these.

I think that will cover Laptop -> Dell 3007 @ 2560 X 1600. The only issue is regarding multiple monitors.

I think your saying that I will need 2 X graphics cards to cover each monitor? I'm assuming that it would be impossible to connect all three monitors to my work laptop?

cmndr_andi · 2 Feb 2012 at 20:28

kiwi1 said:
Thanks guys. I think with the 3007 I'm quite limited. Reading around I think I need one of these.

I think that will cover Laptop -> Dell 3007 @ 2560 X 1600. The only issue is regarding multiple monitors.

Aye, that would be the adapter to go for - Apple also do a DP to dual-link DVI active adapter.

I think you could also connect a second monitor via the VGA (D-sub) connection, but I'm not sure in the laptop display could be used as a third display in this arrangement.

kiwi1 said:
I think your saying that I will need 2 X graphics cards to cover each monitor? I'm assuming that it would be impossible to connect all three monitors to my work laptop?

Yea, Nvidia graphics cards (apart from a few special ones) only allow you to connect up two monitors per card. Therefore if you want to connect up three monitors then you will need a second card to drive the 3rd monitor. It doesn't need to be the same model as the main one or run in SLI - just needs to be from nvidia (not AMD/ATI).