Im currently running a 32" HDTV 1080p and a 16" LCD (I have two of these) from the rig in my sig, now that i've got my student loan im going to order a replacement for my 32" for about £200, something like this? The plan is to buy a second cheap graphics card and set up the monitors as follows: GTX 285 - 24" + 32" (for films) Cheapo Card - 16" + 16" 4 displays are overkill but why not? I was just wondering if this sort of setup would have any hit on gaming performance (I will only be running games on the 24" alone)? Once the GTX285s come down in bit I would probably replace the temp card and run SLI and the 2* 16" monitors would be replaced with a couple more 24"s. Any help on this would be appreciated as well as any monitor recommendations for about £200? Cheers
Why a GTX 285? The 5850 is, at worst, equal to the GTX 285 in terms of performance, though often much faster, yet it's substantially cheaper, has lower idle and load power consumption, runs cooler, is smaller, has DX11 support and better image quality (especially with AA) and, importantly for you, has the option of running 3 displays from a single card. Then you can Crossfire them later. EDIT: I see you already have a GTX 285 (I should really leave displaying sigs on ).
When in SLI mode you cannot run more than one screen. It sucks but there you go. Good work nVidia. That being the case you'd be better sticking with a second, cheaper card just to drive the 3rd and 4th screens. If they're only displaying 2D apps such as the desktop then a relatively cheapo card will suffice regardless of how big the screens are.
Fail. Yea I should have said, the other monitors will only be used for winamp, xfire, PDFs etc. Thanks Because I already own it?
Nope I run a 6 monitor display back at home, 4 in the pc room, and 2 in the living room... 2x22" on 8800gtx (this is the primary gaming card) 1x22"+1x42" on 8800GTS (used for physx) and 1x15"+1xProjector on a 8400GS these 2 displays are located in the living room. There is absolutely no noticeable difference in gaming perfomance what so ever. You will however want to try ensure that the multiple gfx cards you use are in the same driver set... Specially more so if your running Vista which allows only 1 display driver to be loaded at any time, however this is not an issue in Windows XP or Windows 7. The nvidia drivers are pritty good for this, with the 191.07 drivers for Vista/Win7 support all the gforce cards from series 6 to the gforce 200 series. Although from previous experience a few years back when mixing different series cards together, i noticed that there was a large performance hit on the secondary displays, almost unsable, so if you can, try to at least keep all the gfx cards in the same series for maximum compatability. I would like to think that they have resolved this issue with the later cards and drivers, but I am unable to confirm or deny, perhaps someone else might be able to. Unfortunately with SLI, you will loose the extra 2 displays on the secondary gfx card or is it 1 display per card, I forget, either way once you enable SLI, your find that you will have 2 less outputs. If your intentions are for gaming, then generally spekaing you may like to look for a TN TFT pannel, despite the lesser viewing angles and contrast ratios compared to xVA TFT displays, you can pick up some nice large displays for less than £200. I recently purchased myself 3x22" (Dell S2209W) which I have found to perform very well. This paticular display is of the 16:9 ratio (1920x1080 resolutoin), which is great for the old HD movies too. Viewsonic VX2233wm ?? also have a nice display which has the added adition of a hdmi port, again this display is 16:9. What ratio/resolutoin are you idealy looking for?
Thanks for the info, sounds like you got an awesome setup there haha. Looks like I will just stick with my single 285 and drop in something like an 9400 just to run 3rd and 4th. The main reaason I want a new primary monitor to replace the 32" is that its just too big to be staring at for uni work really, as for ratio I really do not mind as i've been using 16:9 for the last few years with no complaints so either :9 or :10 is fine. The other problem with the 32" is that its a TV with a native resolution of 1366x768 which is really poor for photoshop work and browsing as you could imagine (even though it runs @ 1920x1080 for games without flickering and looks great). Ideally im looking for a 24" 1920x1200, ive seen a few 26" displays with the same res which aren't much more money but would the picture be noticeably less sharp with the same pixel count spread over a larger display?
Well thats an interesting point, as its the same pixel count the pixel dot pitch will be larger and thus more likely to be noticeable, one of the things that I came to discover with displays that use a tight dot pitch is that there was less of a need for intense antialising as the pixels are so tight already. This is something the Bit-Tech crew has also memtioned before... Link (last paragraph in "subjective image quality").
