Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hey there, I currently have one 19' WS monitor and over the summer i'm planning on buying another 19' WS and a 22" WS and am looking for the best way to hook the monitors up to my computer.

Now I know all about the triplehead2go, however i dont want to spend another $300 on that, and it also has relatively bad widescreen support (especially for use with the 22")

So what Im looking at doing is buying a second video card. I currently have a 8800 GTS. So in general i guess my options for this would be to buy a cheap PCI video card (like a FX 5200) for one of the monitors while plugging the other two into the GTS. Or I thought that I could possibly Buy a PCI-E card, and possibly plug both secondary monitors into it and just have the 22" monitor plugged into the GTS.

My main concern about multiple video cards is any effect it would have on performance. would multiple cards make things lag? if it would a bit would it be a serious problem? also if things were to lag across say the secondary monitors plugged into a second PCI-E card, would the 22" not suffer a performance loss being plugged into the GTS all by its self? also would the fact that the 8800 is a DX10 card cause driver issues if i tried to install a card that didn't support DX10?

Thanks in advance for your help.

*Also if it helps, heres my rig*
CPU- E6600
MOBO- P5W DH Delux
GPU- Evga 8800 GTS
RAM- 2gb Mushkin XP2-6400
PSU- Mushkin XP-650

okay, first of all, you can run two screens off one card no problem

second. Two card does not ruin performance at all, I've ran a AIW PCI card and ran a monitor off it. I will say that hte lower card normally would hiccup when I sent stuff over...like videos that require more data I'd get a millisecond freeze in sound as the video got rerouted to the other card...but the PCI card I had was older.

If your running 3 screens, I almost would opt for another PCI-E card if you have an SLI mobo.

No, you shouldn't have any problems from that.

However, note that you will not be able to play games on all 3 monitors without SIGNIFICANT drops in performance, because you have to use software such as SoftTH to play across the three screens.

And with driver issues I've personally found that my 8800GTS can't have 2 monitors plugged in without having a performance hit of rendering games across both. Don't ask me why.

wow thanks for the quick replys

I`m happy to hear that using 2 cards would work fine. And I fully understand that playing games across all three won`t work, and i dont plan on doing so so that shouldn't`t be a problem.

I guess now i have to choose a second video card. Do you guys think id be best off just buying a cheap PCI card, or do you thin`k I should look at getting a PCI-E card. If i were to get a PCI card i would probably be looking at a cheap FX5500 or something. however if having two monitors plugged in to the GTS causes a performance hit, might it be better to get a cheap PCI-E card like an 8500 GT even, and plug my two secondary monitors into that so i just have my one primary plugged into the GTS

nvidia's drivers conflicts if you mix 8800 series with 7 or 6 series.. 8500gt with 8800 gts should be ok

Word of warning... Sli will work with a 8800gts and a 8500 but your rig will be limited to the speed of the slowest card (same performance as 2x8500.) So you'd be better off scraping up the cash for another 8800gts. However, you can get the 320mb card as vram isnt shared by Sli (because the textures and other graphical information need to be loaded onto each card.)

I don't plan on doing sli though. with sli I would only be able to use one of the outputs. im just going to have a secondary card, independant of the first, which i would plug my other monitors into.

If you don't want to game on all three, then PCI is fine. If you want to game, then you will need a PCI-E card and use SoftTH. Either way the card should be a cheap one.

You say you don't want to game on all three, but I ask - why not? With SoftTH you can even have proper resolution support for the center widescreen. Get a PCI-E card to at least give yourself the option.


When you run three monitors off of two video cards, it's best to connect 2 monitors to the primary card and one to the secondary, although it doesn't really matter.