Most cost effective solution to having 3 monitors hooked up ?

[hotjiggy]

Is eyefinity the most cost effective ?

I currently have 2 hdmi monitors and plan to buy another one soon. Since I am new to all this I just thought it would be the case of having a graphics card with 3 outputs but I read somewhere only two monitors are natively supported. So either I have to get additional graphics card - or set up eyefinity.

Can someone clarify my understanding please, and suggest a cost effective graphics card for hooking up 3 monitors ? I won't be using 3 monitors for gaming.

This is what I have in mind currently - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-x...s-hdmi-2x-dvi-

Thanks.

[jim]

Eyefinity cards support 3 monitors simultaneously, but one of them will need to be Displayport according to the AMD website. Or you can use an active Displayport -> HDMI adapter.

[hotjiggy]

What about the nvidia cards ? is it possible to connect 3 monitors with one card without the eyefinity type of setup ?

[darrensen]

Does the kfa2 680 allow 3 screens. Might be worth looking into that?

[scaryjim]

I believe Kepler supports 3 monitors out of the box, although I don't think NVidia have a single large surface technology like Eyefinity (although I could be wrong...). That means anything down to a GT640 will support 3 simultaneous outputs, as long as the card has the appropriate ports.

Is this for gaming, or just for monitor real estate? The 7750 is a good option as long as you can get an active adapter for the third HDMI monitor. A GT640 with 2x DVI and 1x miniHDMI is ~ £75 (the standard outputs for GT640 appear to be VGA, DVI and HDMI) - if you wanted to connect 3 HDMI monitors you'd need to source appropriate adapters too, although you should be able to pick up Male DVI to female HDMI adapters for less than a tenner each

[scaryjim]

Posted this in one of your other threads, but thought I'd add it here:

*sudden though*

If all you want to do is run 3 monitors, get a cheap AMD card - a 5450 or some such - and use "hydravision" (or whatever it's called now) and you can run the IGP and the GPU at the same time, giving you up to four monitors

[jim]

I think Hydra is that Lucid technology that claimed to let you use nVidia and AMD cards simultaneously, but never worked properly. I think the integrated one has a really bland name like hybrid crossfire or something.

[scaryjim]

I think Lucid do have a technology called Hydra, but Hydravision is an old ATI technology that - AFAIK - AMD have continued to support. My 785G board has a BIOS setting that allows you use an ATI graphics card and the onboard HD4200 GPU together for many-monitor goodness

AHA! A little research suggests that the technology is now called Surroundview - same basic idea though. You can drive monitors from both the AMD discrete card and the IGP.

[jim]

Ah, with you now. No, I've never heard of Hydravision.

I'd always thought that such behaviour was so utterly obvious and normal that all boards would support it... and then I got my Z68.

[hotjiggy]

hmm.. not sure about betting for an unproven tech... eyefinity it is..

[scaryjim]

hmm.. not sure about betting for an unproven tech... eyefinity it is..

It's not unproven. It was around for many years before eyefinity was dreamt of. It's by far the cheapest way to run more than 2 monitors. The question is: what's more important to you, cost or ease? It'll take slightly more work to set up surround vision - you'll probably have to do some set up work in the BIOS and in Windows - but it'll be a lot cheaper because you can buy a £25 graphics card. Eyefinity will be easier to set up, but you'll need to buy a more expensive graphics card and - to run three monitors - either a displayport monitor or an active displayport adapter.

And actually, you won't even be using eyefinity. Eyefinity is the name for the single large surface technology that convinces Windows that you've got one big monitor not three separate one. For what you want to do - just use 3 monitor's worth of desktop - you don't need to do that. You can just extend the desktop onto each monitor. You'll still need the displayport monitor or active adapter though...