3rd Monitor

furnace

furnace

furnace

Soldato
Joined
12 Dec 2006
Posts
3,421
Location
Worthing, West Sussex
Okay so I've got my second monitor, and now I just can't help but think how cool it would be to finish it off with a third... I mean not right now, but maybe over the next year I might get another one. The benefits of a third would be truley great - read documents on one, do work in the middle, and have distractions on the right :D

But it seems to bring about a lot of complications?

I'd need two graphics cards? Then I'd need a motherboard that either supports ATI Xfire or nVidia SLI? And then those two cards would have to be the same card?

Or are there other ways of using a third monitor?
 
You don't need Xfire or SLi to run multiple graphics cards, just to run them together to improve 3D performance on a single screen. SLi doesn't even support multiple screens (unsure about Xfire).

Throw a graphics card (ideally of the same make as your existing graphics card) into any spare slot (PCI, PCI-e) and you're good to go. A program such as Ultramon is recommended to streamline multiple monitor use.

Alternatively, the Matrox triplehead2go allows a single nVidia graphics card to output to 3 screens (up to 1280x1024 on each) whilst treating them as one.
 
Ah right, cool :D

So the cards can be totally different cards? I could get a £20 second hand card for a 3rd monitor, which will only ever run a desktop, and it wont bother my first card, which will run games? The two cards run like, independantly?

I guess the two cards would need to run using the same drivers then (e.g. not an ATI and an nVidia in the same machine, like you said)?

That triplehead2go thing is very expensive..!
 
furnace said:
Ah right, cool :D

So the cards can be totally different cards? I could get a £20 second hand card for a 3rd monitor, which will only ever run a desktop, and it wont bother my first card, which will run games? The two cards run like, independantly?

I guess the two cards would need to run using the same drivers then (e.g. not an ATI and an nVidia in the same machine, like you said)?

That triplehead2go thing is very expensive..!
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've run combinations of AGP and PCI nVidia cards of different generations, and PCI-e cards (7300LE+7950GT for instance) together without issue.
 
Good stuff.

Do you have any idea what Vista is like with different cards? I heard something silly like it has to be the exact same card twice - and this wasn't an article talking about SLI, it was talking about running more than 2 displays..?
 
I had this same question a few weeks ago, now i have my third monitor (32" HDTV :D ) just trying to find a cheap radeon on ebay :)

Also on the subject of ultramon, I found it a little annoying at times, and I dont like the standard task bar... I use geoshell as a shell replacement, you can have taskbars on each monitor anywhere you want them :)

looks like this.
 
Is that icon bar from object dock? I've also been using that of recent, and if you're feeling radical you can remove the standard taskbars and not use Ultramon. The expanding icon bar that comes in from the side is rather natty :D
 
Might have to give that a go, although at the moment I'd certainly recommend object dock :)
 
I found object dock a little unstable at times, and caused some problems when i had programs/games overlapping it. Rocket Dock has a few more features and has been more stable for me.

I guess it depends on what is stable for you, other than the few extra features on Rocket Dock they're mainly the same.

The one thing i did like about object dock when I used it was being able to display a screenshot of the program you had running, so you could use ti as a taskbar too, but the novelty of that kinda wore off and there are a few bugs with it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom