I am looking at upgrading from my current system to something with a little more kick. My goal is to be able to run both WoW and Civilization 4 simultaneously on a dual 1280x1024 screen setup. Has anyone out there tried this? If so, what are you're system specs?

Any info would be appreciated.

I run two monitors at the resolution you want on the system in my sig. You will have to run the games in windowed mode as opposed to full screen else you cant mouse between screens.

However i can't really run two games at once - the secondary screen is fine for browsing etc whilst games run on screen one but I think the gfx card (at least mine) prioritises workload on the primary monitor...as a consequence games are very choppy on the second monitor (even if I'm only playing one game. A second gfx card might solve this problem but at a high cost - maybe the high end nvidia's dont suffer from this problem using just one card but I'm not in a position to confirm that.

Oh yeh - Supreme Commander supports two monitors and runs fine across both of them, I'm guessing that the code shares workload across the primary and secondary gfx outputs.

Thanks for the info Benzene.

With my current system the second screen gets choopy if I run anything but IE or iTunes. So if you have the same problem with an OCed 6600 and 2gig of ram then it must be a video card issue. I wonder if a 8800GTS 320 would have the power to do this or if I would need a 640 or GTX?

Since a game that supports dual monitors runs fine (no chop-chop) I guess the cards must be able to handle it, I think the problem is that one monitor becomes "primary" and its workload is prioritised by the gfx drivers. ..maybe someone will come along and tell us if an 8800GTS can pull it off.

I have an 8800gts (evga superclocked 640mb) running 2 displays (and an mx420 for my third monitor).

I am able to run Vanguard and AoE 3 with no problems as long as I do not drag either game to my aging pci g4 420mx....

it_guy,

So the monitors that are running both games are being driven by the 8800gts? What type of graphics settings and framerates while both are running?

Here are some Dual Head video cards.

http://www.multi-monitors.com/category_s/1914.htm

Is this kinda what you are trying to do?

Multiple Monitor Computer Video

I have a Day Trading Computer just like this and I do different things on all the screens.
However, when you play video games, sometimes it limits the functionality of the other screens.

If you want four monitors on one graphics card you should try the NVidia Quadro NVS 440.

Either way, multiple monitor computers rock! You should definitely go with at least a dual screen display.

Nice work on the necropost.