Multi Monitor Question

2L84SLEEP · 11 Jan 2009 at 18:20

Hi all

I currently have an old system which currently has 3 tft monitors connected to it. The first monitor connects to the motherboard and the other two connect to an old graphics card I bought which has one VGA port and one DVI port. I have only really used the pc for browsing and never games.

The question I have is I am now looking to buy a new system for playing flight sims on and want to make sure I buy the right stuff. I see most graphics cards nowadays have two monitor connectors on them but what would be the best thing to do since I am going to need to connect 3 monitors to the new system?

Thanks :cool:

Conan257 · 11 Jan 2009 at 19:37

If you want some sort of decent gameplay, you have little options...

You'll need SLI or X-fire to run 3 monitors at high quality and you'll also need a lot of ram... Unless your playing old games

orderoftheflame · 11 Jan 2009 at 19:43

Don't quote me on this, but I've a feeling you can't have 3 monitors on Sli...

You'd need to have an Sli setup powering two of the monitors, then a third card powering the third monitor.

Slizone.com said:
How many monitors are supported when running in SLI mode?
With GeForce R180 drivers, SLI supports a maximum of two monitors with both monitors connected to the same GPU within your SLI group. For instance, if you have a 3-way SLI configuration, you can connect two monitors to one of the GPUs and leave SLI enabled. You can enable more monitors by using a third GPU that is NVIDIA PhysX capable (GeForce 8 series and higher with at least 256MB of memory) and is a different GPU than your SLI GPUs.

Have a read of these links.

http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_faq.html#s7
http://www.slizone.com/object/sli_multi_monitor.html

I could be wrong and it may be possible however.

Pulse · 11 Jan 2009 at 19:50

That or just buy a single card with 4 outputs? -4850x2

2L84SLEEP · 11 Jan 2009 at 20:45

Thanks for all the replies. What would people class as 'decent gameplay'. I admit I am not clued up. I have a 19" monitor and 2 15" monitors and run them just on 1024 *768.

The last card posted looks ideal but does anyone indeed know if this would work or not?

Thanks

G1BB0 · 11 Jan 2009 at 21:19

I think you can only use 2 monitors with sli... I do a little bit of sim racing and from what I have read you need a matrox triple head to output to 3 monitors

found this review
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/triplehead2go/

hope it helps

Kennysevenfold · 11 Jan 2009 at 22:10

G1BB0 said:
I think you can only use 2 monitors with sli...

same here....Hmmm :confused:

Pulse · 12 Jan 2009 at 05:34

2L84SLEEP said:
<snip>

Googling doesn't bring that much help on the SLi front, but due to the time I didn't bother looking too hard. With the card I posted it should support 3 monitors by itself and should be powerful enough to provide smooth game play in flight sims.

Decent game play is considered to be above 30fps at full resolution with the highest settings possible.

jammir · 12 Jan 2009 at 05:51

Pulse said:
That or just buy a single card with 4 outputs? -4850x2

do nvida make one like that?

Conan257 · 12 Jan 2009 at 07:49

You can run 4 monitors on SLI, but what happens is that the cards do not run in SLI... Its basicly the same as running 2 seperate cards... They'll still output to any monitors connected, but they'll not support each other in afr or any other methods...

Benimaru · 12 Jan 2009 at 13:16

wow never knew ati made a card that had 4 outputs in a single card wonder if they make one with a 4870

orderoftheflame · 12 Jan 2009 at 13:53

Conan257 said:
You can run 4 monitors on SLI, but what happens is that the cards do not run in SLI... Its basicly the same as running 2 seperate cards... They'll still output to any monitors connected, but they'll not support each other in afr or any other methods...

Surely then that's not running 4 monitors on Sli. :confused:

That's running four monitors on two cards?

Conan257 · 12 Jan 2009 at 16:54

Unfortunately, SLI has become a term for a system running 2 graphics cards... In this case, misquoted.

britboy4321 · 12 Jan 2009 at 17:02

I wouldn't get too excited with spending masses of money. People here are well into top-of-the-range systems. If you're anything like my dad (!!) and don't live and breath PC but want a laugh ... yes 1024*768 is fine all games cope with it. Don't get more than 2gb of RAM (or less!). Windows Vista home premium is fine for your purposes. Don't consider spending > £600 total for the lot you just don't need to.

If you want a kick-a$$ system, please ignore this entire reply! but yes, people on this board are going to diss me for saying this, but for 99%of the population 1024*768 resolution is 100% fine.