Dual displays: 1 from GPU, 1 from motherboard?

SMed

SMed

SMed

Associate
Joined
6 Nov 2011
Posts
1,427
Location
Bucks
I want to connect my TV to my PC. I have a Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 motherboard, Asus 6850 GPU. I'm using a Dell U2311H monitor and want to connect a Sony LCD HD ready (720) TV for video/TV etc.

Is it possible to run my monitor off of the 6850 GPU and use the onboard motherboard graphics for the TV? I have seen this before, but I don't know if it's possible with my equipment.

Thanks.
 
Hi there,

Why not just plug the TV directly into the 6850 graphics card (presumably the TV is HDMI)?

Then connect the monitor up via DVI or Displayport.

This GPU can support a total of three displays, so running a monitor and a TV won't be a problem.


It is possible to run a monitor off the motherboard and another off the GPU, but it isn't ideal since it must be done through lucid virtu. Connecting both displays to the graphics card is certainly preferable.
 
cmndr_andi said:
Hi there,

Why not just plug the TV directly into the 6850 graphics card (presumably the TV is HDMI)?

Then connect the monitor up via DVI or Displayport.

This GPU can support a total of three displays, so running a monitor and a TV won't be a problem.


It is possible to run a monitor off the motherboard and another off the GPU, but it isn't ideal since it must be done through lucid virtu. Connecting both displays to the graphics card is certainly preferable.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. Just realised I forgot another part of my question. :D Was what I'm asking even preferable and why?

I was thinking maybe if the TV was running off the same card as the GPU, it would detract some performance away from the GPU/monitor? It wouldn't matter most of time as if I were gaming, I won't be using the TV. But then I thought if I had anyone in the study with me and they were watching TV whilst I was gaming it might hurt gaming performance.
 
With modern cards like the HD 6850 rendering a second 720p screen and even decoding HD video onto it is not very hard and doesn't really affect performance.

As I mentioned, you can run the TV off the motherboard, but there are two issues with this:

- The onboard intel GPU has a problem with the framerates of videos - so annoyingly it will drop frames every few minutes (this doesn't happen with AMD and Nvidia graphics cards)
- Using the lucid virtu system (which is required to use the onboard GPU and discrete graphics card at the same time) there is an overhead which reduces your performance in games when using it. In most cases, this overhead is greater than the performance dip of driving a second screen from the same graphics card (with virtu disabled).

Therefore, I would still recommend using the graphics card for both displays.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom