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Driving 3 monitors with onboard graphics and a second independent GFX card?

gambit37

gambit37

gambit37

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Joined
22 Nov 2007
Posts
15
OK, showing my ignorance here...! I have an ASUS motherboard with onboard ATI Radeon 4200 -- it works fine at driving 2 monitors for work purposes.

Is it possible to add another independent graphics card to run a third monitor? If it *is* possible, presumably it would have to be an ATI card?
 
While not exactly the same scenario as you

I have 3 monitors powered by a 5970 Eyefinty and my 4 monitor (a 42' LCD) powers by a separate ATI 3450.

So the set up your trying to achieve should be fine. I think you would have to stick with another ATI card as otherwise there may be driver conflicts.

My only note of caution on this is whether or not the onboard card will disable itself on detecting a card in the PCI slot. You might want to refer to the motherboard manual for that.

Taff
 
The answer should be yes if your motherboard supports ATI Hybrid CrossFireX, you will need a certified VGA card though, i.e., ATI Radeon HD 2400 or 3400 series.
I have a gigabyte board for my media centre which has onboard ATI Radeon 4200 and an AMD 785G chipset.
Check your motherboards manual or on the Asus website for the specs.
 
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Among the features you will see:

ATI Eyefinity Technology

Eyefinity allows three monitors as long as at least one of them uses the displayport connector. So you cannot use two x DVI and 1 x VGA for example. So yes, using this you can run three monitors using the correct ports, but I'm not sure if they all have to be the same resolution. Anyone?
 
Thanks for the heads up. A quick google and I found this:

Can I support different resolutions?
All monitors running in a Display Group or cloned modes must be running with the same resolution. If monitors have different native resolutions, the highest common non-native resolution between the monitors will be used when creating Display Groups. Monitors running in extended desktop mode can have independent resolutions.

http://sites.amd.com/us/underground/products/eyefinity/Pages/faq.aspx#link16

Sounds like that would work fine for me in extended desktop mode, as I'll have three different sized screens (1920x1080, 1920x1200 and 1280x1024). I'll do a bit more reading just to make sure.
 
Yes, as long as you don't run eyefinity, in normal extended desktop mode, you can have different resolutions. I think it *might* be possible to run off two from DVI from the 5770, and the third from the onboard 4200, saving you a bit of cash from buying a display port adapter/monitor. But it depends on your motherboard.
 
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ubersonic said:
Dear god people read the original post, he doesn't want to run a triple monitor eyefinity gaming setup he wants it for work!!!

to OP:

don't waste money on the card you linked, http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-125-OK&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat= would do the job fine for £32, hell so would [a link from the bay] and thats only £7!

you wont get driver conflicts, people use set-ups like this all the time
Click to expand...

Remove the bay link ;)
True, the 5770 seems over kill, what sort of work do you do?
 
I didn't say that I don't want to also play games. ;-)

I do web design/development and mostly want the three screen setup for ease of production as I need several full screen apps open at the same time (Photoshop CS5 in OpenGL mode, multiple browsers, text editor, file manager, Word, etc.) I also do hi-def graphics/photography work and some 3D. Photoshop runs a bit slow, but that could be due to only having 4GB RAM.

I figured rather than try and botch some three screen setup using the on board card and a cheap third card, I'd get better performance in PhotoShop if I went with a better dedicated card. Hence the 5770 (which will also give me better performance in games -- the onboard card can't run my 1920x1080 screen on any game at a playabale frame rate, I have to drop to 1280x720 and switch the good stuff off).

But having said that, I think I should just get a cheap card for now as suggested by ubersonic and save up to build a separate gaming machine. At some point, I'll be moving the work machine to an office, so there's not a lot of point putting a powerful gaming card in it.

So do you guys have suggestions on a good card to do high-def graphics and some simple 3D work, while powering 3 screens at different resolutions -- and preferably ATI?
 
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