Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
I have a customer that wants to use three (yes three) screens at once. No games, just spreadsheets and similar. Two screens is easy enough, but what's the go for three screens? Anyone done this recently?
3 monitors
- Thread starter Tannin
- Start date
Sol
Storage is cool
I think you have two options ignoring the possibility of using an old PCI video card.
First an SLI or X-Fire board with a couple of PCI-E video cards, I don't think it would actually matter in this case if they were configured to use SLI or X-Fire.
Alternatively an ATI chipset board with onboard video and a dual head ATI video card. This configuration allows you to use the onboard video card as a third head. The downside is you have to use ATI (Which I don't think is a bad thing but I know you will) and you have to use an Intel CPU, which isn't great but may end up being more efficient than buying two PCI-E video cards...
There are also some cards (Top shelf ATI gear) offering a feature called dual link DVI where you can plug two monitors into each of the two DVI ports via a seperate cable. But I can't find one for much less than $900 so it's probably not a particularly viable option at this point.
Any way you go your still going to be spending a fair bit of money if you want 3 DVI ports which it would be nice to have. I'm assuming that all 3 monitors will be LCDs at this point. 3 CRTs seems kind of insane given the price of LCDs right now.
First an SLI or X-Fire board with a couple of PCI-E video cards, I don't think it would actually matter in this case if they were configured to use SLI or X-Fire.
Alternatively an ATI chipset board with onboard video and a dual head ATI video card. This configuration allows you to use the onboard video card as a third head. The downside is you have to use ATI (Which I don't think is a bad thing but I know you will) and you have to use an Intel CPU, which isn't great but may end up being more efficient than buying two PCI-E video cards...
There are also some cards (Top shelf ATI gear) offering a feature called dual link DVI where you can plug two monitors into each of the two DVI ports via a seperate cable. But I can't find one for much less than $900 so it's probably not a particularly viable option at this point.
Any way you go your still going to be spending a fair bit of money if you want 3 DVI ports which it would be nice to have. I'm assuming that all 3 monitors will be LCDs at this point. 3 CRTs seems kind of insane given the price of LCDs right now.
ddrueding
Fixture
PCI-based graphics cards are slow, but should work fine as a 3rd monitor. It's not tricky at all, I've even run more monitors using both ATI and nVidia cards simultaneously. Not fun, but possible.
Cheap and Easy.
Cheap and Easy.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
A GeForce 6150-based motherboard plus an nVidia card with two outputs should also do the trick. The integrated graphic of the GeForce 6150 can be used in combo with the separate graphic card.
Maybe you could do the same with an ATI Xpress200 chipset and a dual-output ATI card, but I'm not sure. ATI's multi-monitor support isn't as mature as nVidia's.
Maybe you could do the same with an ATI Xpress200 chipset and a dual-output ATI card, but I'm not sure. ATI's multi-monitor support isn't as mature as nVidia's.
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Thanks guys. Looks as though there are several workable methods to pick from. Great! I remember back in the old days, dual displays used to be a horrorshow to set up.
I have a Leadtek 6600GT AGP in stock, and these do dual output, so if I get time tommorow I'll try setting it up with a PCI third card and see what the result looks like. I hope to avoid going down the ATI route as I'll have enough complication on this system without throwing a completely new and unfamilar video chipset into the devil's brew.
What, exactly, is a Geforce 6150? They seem to have at least three different ways of numbering the chipsets, so I'm looking at Gigabyte's home page and can't work out which are the motherboards that use this chipset. (Buggers! Whatever happened to the one chipset, one number rule?) (OK, there never was such a rule - same nonsense used to go down in Pentium Classic days. Still anoying though.)
I have a Leadtek 6600GT AGP in stock, and these do dual output, so if I get time tommorow I'll try setting it up with a PCI third card and see what the result looks like. I hope to avoid going down the ATI route as I'll have enough complication on this system without throwing a completely new and unfamilar video chipset into the devil's brew.
What, exactly, is a Geforce 6150? They seem to have at least three different ways of numbering the chipsets, so I'm looking at Gigabyte's home page and can't work out which are the motherboards that use this chipset. (Buggers! Whatever happened to the one chipset, one number rule?) (OK, there never was such a rule - same nonsense used to go down in Pentium Classic days. Still anoying though.)
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
The GeForce 6150 (and lesser 6100) is the new chipset with integrated graphics from nVidia. GigaByte's boards don't offer DVI output, just VGA, unfortunately. The Asus A8N-VM CSM is a GeForce 6150-based motherboard with a DVI output, but you might be dreaded by the fact that it's an Asus.
Two MCP (nVidia's term for south bridge) can be combined with either the 6100 or the 6150 : MCP 410 and MCP 430. The MCP430 has a few more features than the MCP410 (I don't remember the exact differences). Most often, the GeForce 6150 comes with the MCP430 and the GeForce 6100 is paired to the MCP410, although there are some GeForce 6100 paired to MCP430 (I think GigaByte has one).
Two MCP (nVidia's term for south bridge) can be combined with either the 6100 or the 6150 : MCP 410 and MCP 430. The MCP430 has a few more features than the MCP410 (I don't remember the exact differences). Most often, the GeForce 6150 comes with the MCP430 and the GeForce 6100 is paired to the MCP410, although there are some GeForce 6100 paired to MCP430 (I think GigaByte has one).
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
GigaByte GA-K8N51PVMT-9.
Asus A8N-VM CSN.
And MSI has just released a GeForce 6150-based motherboard with a DVI output just like the Asus : K8NGM2-FID.
Asus A8N-VM CSN.
And MSI has just released a GeForce 6150-based motherboard with a DVI output just like the Asus : K8NGM2-FID.
Stereodude
Not really a
I've found that running nVidia and ATI cards together in a PC is near impossible. They have drivers that simply do not play well together. We have a stack of PCI ATI Radeon 7000's here at work, and they will not get along with any recent nVidia card if you try to load recent drivers for both. If you use the built in Windows XP driver for the ATI card, it will work, but what you can do with the ATI card is very limited.ddrueding said:
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
That's what you get for trying to use nvidia.
Sol
Storage is cool
Recent video drivers from ATI and Nvidia will tend to install thier own AGP GART drivers (I have no real idea what these actually do). It wouldn't surprise me if this was the componant which isn't playing nice. If you decompress the driver packages manualy (or one of them at least) and update the video driver using the windows driver update wizard you may be able to get arround installing all the conflicting componants...