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Which single card for 3 monitor setup?

Soldato
Joined
28 Nov 2003
Posts
11,717
Location
Manchester, UK
See spec in sig.

If I was to keep my setup and change only the gfx card, which single card would my system benefit the most from bearing in mind -

1) Psu is Ocz 700W
2) Gaming on 3x Dell 24'' screens each 1920x1200
3) budget £300-£400

Racing games are simply awesome on 3 screens, at the moment I have grid and dirt showdown which my system handles very well but when I get newer games I want to be able to crank up the settings without performance suffering too much.

I've never had an ATI card, I prefer to stay with nvidia as I'm more familiar with the drivers and I've never had any issues.

What would you recommend?
 
Sadly, there isn't a single card out that will cope with games like Crysis 3/BF4 unless you consider a dual card (7990/690). Something like a pair of 780's will see you well though or try and source a couple of 280X's and hope they fix the frame pacing stutter soon.
 
Top end of your budget but on a this week only deal.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-234-MS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1341

This is one of the best GTX780s out there.

Pretty much all GTX780s will be at the higher end of your budget. I would not even consider a GTX770 as it will not be enough to drive triple screens.

I played Assetto Corsa, PCARS an rFactor 2 using a single GTX780 at 2560x1600 with all detail at near max and got very playable frame-rate. Though with your 3x 1920x1200 screens you will have to overclock AND lower the settings to mid/high on the latest racing games.
 
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Even a single 780 would struggle with a monitor set-up like that, I have a single 2560x1440 monitor (i.e. ~ 3.7M pixels per frame) whereas you have 3 monitors at 1920x1200 each (i.e. ~ 6.9M pixels per frame); so you have around 1.9x more pixels to push than my set-up, and note that I only have a single 780 which already struggles with the more intense games at max/ultra settings.

So, as Greg says, you'd really need something like a pair of 780s to get good frame rates at that kind of resolution with ultra settings on many games.
 
Grid and Dirt are really quite well optimised so you'd get playable performance with medium/high settings with a single 780 - On the other hand, newer games are going to stress a single GPU more, plus you have the downside if you do get two cards you're at the mercy of drivers/optimisation for scaling
 
My single 760 handles GRID and Dirt Showdown very well. I am running at the max res with most settings on high/very high and it is very smooth, the only thing I normally leave off is AA. Even Crysis (first one) runs smooth on max res with most settings on high (no AA) so although I don't expect the very latest games to fly with everything absolutely maxed out, it'd be nice if they run smooth at least at this resolution with settings on high-ish. I only even try AA if everything else is maxed out and it runs smooth.

A mate has offered me a GTX 780ti for £400, I think the Asus model.
 
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