Dual Monitors?

toxic · 28 Mar 2006 at 09:38

Something I have realsied after trolling through the 'show your TFT setups' thread (and man...there are some nice setups!) is that a lot of you guys are running dual monitors. I allreday have a Samsung 19" 913N TFT...which wasnt awfully expensive...and was thinking about changing for a 20" widescreen. However...would I be better just buying another 19" and running two monitors rather than going with 1 x 20 widscreen? When gaming...can the two monitors be used as one giving a big screen...and what do you guys use the dual monitor setups for really???? just trying to get a better understanding of how this works...as I have never used before.

Thanks

NathanE · 28 Mar 2006 at 12:09

If you're a gamer I'd go for a single widescreen. Dual monitors don't really help much when gaming, in fact they're a bit of a hindrance in some cases. Dual monitors are good if you do a lot of work in Windows.

SH4RKY · 28 Mar 2006 at 13:16

Agreed. Dual monitors are usless for games. They create all sorts of resolution issues plus you have an annoying gap in the centre

When every I play a game I just turn the second monitor off.

the_brainaic · 28 Mar 2006 at 13:30

Nonono, don't turn the second monitor off... use it for stuff like IRC, MSN etc that you can do whilst gaming.

toxic · 28 Mar 2006 at 13:42

Agreed then...the dual monitor thingy for games etc. is just a wate of time. Any future monitor changeout will be to a bigger widescreen version.
I guess having two monitors is handy for gaming and using wondows at the same time though...

Thanks

NathanE · 28 Mar 2006 at 13:53

Of course, the ultimate would be to have tri-monitors. A widescreen in the center, for all your gaming needs, then two additional at the side for when you do work in Windows

the_brainaic said:
snip

But what if the game doesnt run at native resolution? The other monitor will get pushed to one side. My experience when gaming with my dual monitors has been that ~80% of the time the 2nd monitor is rendered pretty much useless as soon as you load a game up. I don't know, maybe if my PC could run games at native res' the experience would be a better... :~/ Windows Vista should make the multi-mon experience a lot better than what we have today. The whole concept of "video overlays" is gone in that OS (hooray!) So technically you'll be able to span video and games across multiple monitors effortlessly without any hassle or drawbacks.