Triple monitor setup + SLI

what you saw was probably the Matrox TripleHeadtoGo

adding another card will not allow another display for gaming (since the game would be using the crappy $50 card for the output not the GTX275)

right now your bets to do this are
1) get the Matrox TripleHeadtoGo (it can't do 3 x 1080P, only up to 3 x 1680x1050)
2) get an ATI 58xx series and have 3 monitors off of one card
3) get 2 x GTX4xx and hope they release the drivers soon for surround view (basically eyefinity with a different name)

Well for the first solution you gave I would be getting triple 1680 x 1050 monitors for 5040 x 1050 res but at that cost I might as well just get a new video card like a 5870. Also I heard with the triple head you lose visual quality.

If I was to get a 5870 to run 3 monitors off of wouldn't I need to get that special edition one with 6 displays and how much would that cost? (also with a single 5870 wouldn't that give worse framerate than 2 275's?)

2 GTX 480's would be $1000 plus I would probably have to upgrade my PSU to like a 1kW which would be another $200+ so I don't think I would be able to afford that.


What I was thinking of doing was just disabling SLI which would give me 4 display ports? How good would the performance of 2 non sli 275's spread across 3 monitors be compared to sli 275 + tripleheadtogo?

EDIT: also I saw a vid of this guy with a radeon 4870 + a 4350 running triple monitors playing L4D and he didn't seem to be having any performance issues with that?

i'm not sure, it be awesome if someone could post here about this



yeah, 2 x GTX275's would be better than a single 5870, and you wouldn't need the the eyefinity-6 edition, just an active DisplayPort to DVI adapter



a good 850w should be able to handle SLI GTX480's, though a 950 would be better since it would have more headroom, so it would depend what PSU you have now



i was under the assumption that you couldn't do this (maybe in windowed mode but not full, and in windowed there is bad performance

do you have a link to the Youtube vid?

yeah here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzOAFXadRpE

in the desc. he says that he has a 4870 and a 4350

Just found this site that says I can have more than 2 monitors in a 2-way SLI setup with a 3rd gpu as long as its a not the same as the SLI'd gpus (i.e. 2 GTX 275's in sli + a 3rd 9600GT).

"With GeForce R180 drivers (or later), standard SLI configurations for 2-way, 3-Way, and quad SLI support a maximum of two monitors. Additional monitors (up to 6 monitors total enabled) may be enabled by using either a motherboard GPU and/or a PhysX capable graphics card (GeForce 8 series or higher with at least 256MB of memory) that does not have the same GPU as those that are SLI enabled. More information regarding multi-monitor in SLI can be found here."


http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_faq.html#s1

as for the 3 monitors 4870 + 4350, he is using a software solution that probably only works with source engine games

and i thin the same issue is there with the sli+extra, it won't allow you to fullscreen across multi-monitors

the easiest ways are either the triplehead2go or an ATI 5xxx series

EDIT: working games for the software solution

*  Live for Speed S2

    * Operation Flashpoint

    * Lock On Modern Air Combat

    * Richard Burns Rally

      * Needs forceHorizontalFOV set to 1

    * Elder Scrolls 4 - Oblivion

    * rFactor

    * X3 Reunion

    * GTR 2

    * GT Legends

    * Test Drive Unlimited

      * Enable hooks and doScaleMouseCoordinates to fix cursor clipping

    * Armed Assault

    * Trackmania series

    * BMW M3 Challenge

    * Nascar Racing 2003

    * The Witcher

    * Company of Heroes

    * Call of Duty 2

    * Call of Duty 4

    * GTR Evolution

    * Team Fortress 2

    * Fallout 3

and it only supports dx8 and 9 (not 10 or 11), and i'm assuming that since it works in TF2 you can probably get it working in most of the Source Engine games