Searched the forums and looked through the reviews here without any luck. I very much appreciate y'all helping an old married gamer out...
Question: How is the choice of (gaming) video cards affected by dual monitor usage?
Running Dual-Monitors at 1920x1200 each. Gaming on one monitor while a browser is opened on the other. I have reviewed the recommendations, although they entirely seem to be based on single-monitor solutions.
Ready to purchase a gaming video card; unclear how to optimally proceed:
• Stick to a single graphics card, replacing the 8800gts, and run both monitors off the new card?
• Run the gaming monitor off a new single-slot video card, with the secondary monitor running off the 8800gts in slot2?
-----• Semi-psychotic question: Stick to NVIDIA? You couldn't successfully run a Radeon 4870x2 in slot one and a NVIDIA 8800gts in slot2, right?
• How would running SLI affect things? Upgrading to two GeForce 260 or 280 cards in SLI, instead of a single-card:
-----• SLI the new cards, hook both monitors to them, and toss the 8800?
-----• SLI the new cards and run the gaming monitor from them, and run the secondary monitor from the old 8800 in slot3?
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Current setup (URL-linked for fast part look-up):
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MSI P6N Diamond mainboard
-----• Chipset: NVIDIA® nForce 680i SLI SPP (C55XE), NVIDIA® nForce 570i SLI MCP (MCP55P)
-----• Slots: Four v1.0a PCI Express x16, One v1.0a PCI Express x1
-----• RAM: 8GB Dual-channel DDR2 800
• CPU: Intel Core2 6600@2.40GHz
-----•
Thermaltake Ultimate v1 CPU Cooler
• Hard disk: Four SATA II drives in RAID0 (nForce 590i SLI MCP)
• Graphics: One
MSI 640mb GeForce 8800 gts (factory overclocked)
• Monitors:
Two 28" WUXGA LCD 1920x1200 (default resolution)
• Multimedia: SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio
• Networking: Dual (Realtek RTL8211B) 1/2Gbps Fast Ethernet ports using LACP (IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation)
• Power supply:
SilverStone Strider ST56F 560W Active PFC
• OS: 64bit XP SP3