Single Monitor for dual cards?

[conjuror]

I am building a new PC but will only be using one monitor. I was considering getting dual Radeon HD 6970s; would this he a waste of money or should I opt for a single GTX 580 card?

 

[hunter315]

Depends what you want to be doing with the machine, dual 6970s will beat a GTX 580 and will be great for gaming, but if you are spending that much on the GPUs i would go for a nice big high resolution monitor to get the most out of them.

 

[conjuror]

I see, if i decide to only go for a 24inch or so monitor for gaming should i still consider dual 6970s?

 

[c911darkwolf]

Honestly.. that GTX580 will run like a charm. I'm with hunter what do you plan on doing that would require 2 of them?

I got a old GTX275 and use it for multiboxing wow, and it plays the new Dead Space 2 like a charm.

Personally, I like dual 18-22" monitors for a few reason.

There pretty cheap compared to the larger monitors (over 22" you start seeing a large increase of $ per inch)
Also if you playing a full screen game like say Deadspace, DCUniverse, ect..... you have that extra screen that you can look info up, read walkthroughs, cheats, watch a movie, ect....

On dual monitors my favorite thing in WOW is to read up on bosses while i'm tanking,

My wife has a laptop and uses a external monitor to watch movies while she heals... (sounds weird, but she heals better when she distracted i have no idea why)

Just my 2 cents, but with full screen games it's nice to have that second monitor that can use for a variety of reason vs alt tabing out of a game. (and if its a mmo you can't exactly pause in a dungeon....)

On the other hand, keep in mind it's very hard to find games that natively support dual monitors. your still stuck with flight simulators ect...

 

[conjuror]

I plan on running some heavy duty games and also stream live gameplay online to Justin.TV in HD using black magic intensity pro from my Xbox.