Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hello!
I've been considering picking up a couple extra Acer AL1916W monitors to make a triple monitor setup. I'm running an Nvidia GeForce 660 Ti and I've checked the compatibility for surround and it says its do-able. I'm just not sure what all I would need as my monitors are VGA only, the card has two DVI slots, 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort cable slot. Just wondering if anyone can tell me what cables/adapters I'd need to connect 3 VGA monitors!

pretty simple right!?

Cheapest VGA adapters will work fine for DVI & DP graphics card ports.
HDMI not sure, someone else likely knows.

VGA not great for center, but I think it's not a deal-breaker.
Consider buying HDMI center.
Consider PLP with big HDMI center (27" 1920x1080, ask for more details).
(PLP still looks good with VGA sides, because quality-reduction is pushed out into peripheral vision)

I went into my local pc store today to ask about the set up.. and he advised me to go find some newer monitors and I think that's what i'm going to do.. I found some nice looking 20 inch HP's from best buy on sale for only 99 bucks and I can do 3 of them (display port + 2 DVI) and then my TV (HDMI) to do a triple monitor + the larger display above. should work out well.

Layout sounds good & can't beat a good deal.
The hardest part is likely deciding what layout you want. Sometimes there is an annoying complication to correct, it happens sometimes during setup. More likely the more you add. Sometimes have to mix cords up a bit or [switch monitors & reboot & switch back & reboot] kind of stuff. The stupidest stuff can work, many variables I guess.

The GTX 600 series were the first Nvidia cards to offer surround on a single card. As such there were a few eccentricities with the way it works; most of which were caused from the display outputs Nvidia and the board partners were shipping. Three D-sub connections will work but not as effectively as one might hope for. The TLDR is the two DVI's can be used with any manner of adapters, including the little end piece ones shipped with every GPU for the last decade. The third monitor has to be hooked up via the DP connection. Also it would need to be an active DP>D-sub adapter, and they almost always need to be the exact same SKU(Model) monitors. Any non active adapter wouldn't have Sync detection. The 600 series cards were very finicky about the displays used. When mixing models in most cases unless they are high end monitors the RAMDAC in the GPU might not be able to correctly reconcile the two analog sources from the DVI adapters with the one being converted from the Active DP adapter. You would still be able to run the monitors off them, but in extended desktop and not surround.

Now that is only the case when using all analog monitors. It is much easier to get it all running, even with mismatched displays as long as at least one of them accepts a digital signal. So just to recap you would want three identical displays and 2 dvi>d-sub adapters, and an active DP>D-sub adapter. Now woth that out of the way I would personally suggest you find a couple of different monitors. Displays with a DP connection tend to be more expensive so perhaps look for just HDMI.

In case you were curious about why the HDMI will not work I'll give a brief explanation. The HDMI standard while being very useful in many cases has some design problems at it's core. Unlike all the other connections it is absolutely incapable of passing along an analog signal. Even if you had an adapter the analog signal would have to come from one end. So if it was on the monitor it would need to come from the source, and if it was on the source it would have to go to the monitor. Either way it would need to transport the analog signal from one end. The way the standard is setup any analog signal, even a secondary one embedded in a digital signal will be lost immediately. For example. Everyone I'm sure remembers closed captions on a TV. you could turn them on via the TV and unlike subtitles the were not read and passed through digitally from the source (DVD or BLU-ray) but instead travel on the stream itself and is read and displayed by your TV. By law in most countries CC for the hearing impaired was required of all broadcast TV. However with the emergence of digital cable, all the cable companies ran into a problem. The standard that had been adopted by almost all TV manufacturers was HDMI. As they tried to implement the CC technology for digital content they realized they couldn't meet the standards that different countries legislation had. This was due to everyone owning plasma or LCD HDTV's and using an HDMI cable in stead of the coaxial cable. If you go look at any modern TV if you are watching from a digital source the CC option will be missing or grayed out because the signal can't be processed. Cable companies then had to implement it on their side. So they take the embedded CC stream read and convert it on the box then send it through. Every cable box there is has a secret menu on it. If you leave your TV on then turn your cable box off and hit the Cable box menu button a screen will pop up where you can enable CC and play with the settings of the HDMI stream. Sorry I tried to keep it easy enough to understand but I still ended up with a wall of text. So there you go.I hope this helps n some way.