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

[gambit37]

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?

 

[gambit37]

Cool, thanks for the help, I'll check out my board specs and see what's up.

 

[gambit37]

Just checking in on this again. Would this card allow me to run three monitors on it's own? It has four output ports, so I think I could run 2 screens on the DVI connectors, and one on the DisplayPort? Is that possible?

Club 3D ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB Overclocked GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card [CGAX-57724DPO]

 

[gambit37]

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.

 

[gambit37]

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?