2 1920x1080 monitors for work + 1 2560x1080 for entertainment.

[Bokothor]

Hey all, I'm wondering about something i can't find an answer to by googling for a while, so I thought I'd ask here.

I currently have a 2560x1080 ultrawide monitor positioned over my bed, mostly for gaming and movies. I want to buy 2 extra monitors to place on my desk for productivity reasons, regular 1920x1080 monitors. So these 3 won't get used all at once, it would be a 2 + 1 for seperate purposes.

I'm wondering if it's even doable to set this up on an R280X. An extended desktop on 2 monitors, and then potentially copy the leftmost monitor onto the ultrawide. And have games go to the ultrawide by default. Or potentially just use the 2 16:9's.

Any thoughts if this works ?

Thanks in advance

 

[Cristi72]

Hello,

You can use up to 3 monitors in an extended desktop with that card, but I'm not sure you can clone one monitor to another, given the different resolutions. The best way is to use HD's as primary + secondary and the UW as tertiary. Which connection are you use right now for UW? DVI, DP? What are your card's available outputs?

 

[Bokothor]

The UW is connected through HDMI, i have 2 displayports and a DVI available on top of that.

I'm mainly worried about driver settings, like the drivers forcing the UW to be limited to 1920x1080, or games defaulting to one of the "small" monitors instead of the UW and being unable to reassign them. I haven't used multiple monitors so far, but i'm eager to

 

[Cristi72]

I used to have an Radeon 4870 a while ago and the card's utility could assign applications for each display (it was XP era though...) Nowadays, the OS memorizes on which display a certain application was running and upon restart it will run that application on the same display. You can use the UW as your primary monitor and use the other two in an extended desktop setup. However, if you are working with multiple applications at once, the ALT-TAB menu appears only on the primary display and if the taskbar cannot be replicated on HD's it will be difficult to switch between applications.

Please check this:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2009789/asus-radeon-280x-monitors.html

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1908617/monitors-280x-working.html

For best results, you should drive the HD's by using the DP ports.

 

[Bokothor]

I guess it should work then, it'll just take some fiddling around to see what works best regarding taskbar and primary monitor and such.

Thank you for your help

 

[Cristi72]

Don't mention it, enjoy the setup!

UPDATE: WIN8 has the possibility to tell on which monitor the taskbar is displayed. I will double check tomorrow night while at work, as we have some multi-display setups and I'll get back to you with the infos. I can't do gaming, but I will try to watch a full screen movie/video while working.

 

[Bokothor]

That would be great, i'm ordering in a couple of days, so your efforts would be very much appreciated!

 

[Cristi72]

Hello again, I just made the tests and it works! You can replicate the taskbar on all displays and you can choose if you want to see all icons from the main taskbar or only the icons from the programs running on that display (right-click on the taskbar --> Properties --> Show taskbar on all displays).

Full-screen movies were running on the primary monitor without a problem and wasn't interfering with the programs on the other display (I had only 2 monitors, but I don't see why it will behave differently with 3). I observed a problem when watching streamed TV programs on Internet Explorer: if you open IE on any display, the full-screen image is always showed on the primary one; by using VLC player, the movie was running full-screen on the display where the program was opened.

The best layout seems to be UW(1) + HD(2) + HD(3). Just be sure that the HD monitors will have DP input and you will find the cables; I assume that the DP outputs from the card are mini-DP, so you must search the mini-DP--> DP cables, something like that:

http://www.amazon.com/Monoprice-32AWG-Mini-DisplayPort-Cable/dp/B0034X6SCY.

 

[Bokothor]

If i remember correctly, DP cables are included with the monitors i'm buying, so that should be ok. Right now i don't get the option to duplicate the taskbar (Win7 64bit Home) but that's probably cause there's only 1 screen attached. Either way, I like your "report" and i'm gonna take the plunge into multi-monitor-madness

Thanks a lot, I appreciate it!

 

[Cristi72]

You're welcome!

I am not sure if WIN 7 can do that taskbar replication; I could test only on WIN 8...

Please be sure that the monitors will came with required cables, as most of them has the standard DP port (the bigger one) and most graphics cards has mini-DP ports (a smaller version of DP).