Two different graphics cards for two different monitors?

[HopelessNoob]

Hey,

I currently have a gaming desktop with a gtx 560ti at school. Both of my 24" monitors are connected to the same card. I was wondering if I stripped one of my older PCs at home of a GT430 and put it in my gaming desktop and took one of the monitors and plugged it into the GT430 would it be better?

Thanks

 

[jaguarskx]

You could do that I supposed. Based on someone who was running benchmarks over at Hardforum, attaching a 2nd 1920x1200 resolution monitor to his Radeon HD 6850 caused a small drop in gaming performance; about 3%. Nothing was displayed on that monitor other than the desktop. If you want to watch a movie / video while playing a game, then expect a decrease in performance. How much dunno, he didn't test that.

Personally, I would not bother for such a small performance drop.

 

[HopelessNoob]

You could do that I supposed. Based on someone who was running benchmarks over at Hardforum, attaching a 2nd 1920x1200 resolution monitor to his Radeon HD 6850 caused a small drop in gaming performance; about 3%. Nothing was displayed on that monitor other than the desktop. If you want to watch a movie / video while playing a game, then expect a decrease in performance. How much dunno, he didn't test that.

Personally, I would not bother for such a small performance drop.

thanks for the response but what if I were to lets say do intensive CPU work too like streaming while I play games?

 

[jaguarskx]

If you are going to play games and stream, then I would say use the GT 430 for the other monitor since decoding video stream uses a bit of GPU power. Since you already have both cards you can test it out yourself. Use something like MSI Afterburner to monitor the FPS just playing games and then playing games and streaming video to the other monitor using just the GTX 560 Ti. I would guess that would cause about a 15% drop in FPS when playing games and streaming video at the same time.