Hooking up 3 monitors

J273 · 5 Apr 2007 at 19:18

Ive currently got 2 20 inch dell monitors side by side and work perfect plugged in to my 6600gt PCI-e Card.

Ive just orderd a 24" DELL and plan on hooking up all 3 to my system.

whats the best way to go about doing this?.....My mobo supports SLI say if i bought another identical card as the one ive got and fitted the SLI bridge...would this allow me to hook up 4 montiors with there being 4 heads (2 VGA / 2 DVI)?.....or is SLI not needed to hook up the 3

But say if i bought a differnet card to the 1 ive got will this still work or would it have to be in an SLI setup for me to have the 4 heads working and configurable through windows display properties.

Any ideas guys?

Cheers

Hussman · 5 Apr 2007 at 20:15

Why not try a Matrox Triple Head 2 Go set up?

J273 · 5 Apr 2007 at 20:30

Yea thought about that

would prefer to add another card to my system at the minute....Maybe cheaper

Trifid · 5 Apr 2007 at 20:42

Hussman said:
Why not try a Matrox Triple Head 2 Go set up?

Max res of 1280x1024.

Get a cheap PCI card to hook up one of the monitors.

28ten · 5 Apr 2007 at 21:01

I used to run 3 monitors and i found a pci card worked but the performance wasn't great

SoiL · 5 Apr 2007 at 21:34

i thort with SLI, when u add a 2nd graphics card u are only then able to use ONE of the 4 possible video ports...
or did i read wrong?

i realy dont know how u would do that besides using a pci card if the SLI thing is like that...

Abyss · 6 Apr 2007 at 02:56

Just add a second pci-e video card to your pc. If you want all monitors to perform well in games you'll want a card similar to your primary. You will not be able to run them in sli though (using the bridge), as this will mean you can only use one monitor. It's worth noting though that if you do buy a second identical card, (as far as I am aware), you can set them up in sli, and setup profiles so that in normal desktop usage it will use them as separate cards, and in games it will turn on sli and disable the second two monitors.

fobose · 6 Apr 2007 at 10:21

If you use Sli you cant use multiple monitors with the current forceware drivers IIRC. Why not grab yourself a "512MB XFX 7600GS PCI-E(x16) Mem 533MHz GPU 400MHz 12Pipes Dual DVI/HDTV SLi Passive Cooling" for £81.42 and use as primary and the 6600gt as secondary, it'll be an upgrade from your 6600gt and having both your 20" Dell's on DVI will make the colour look much more similar if not the pretty much identical.