Duel screen - yay or nay?

[Andeh13]

Im of to uni this saturday and id saved up a £150 for a fridge, however iv just been told i cant use a fridge due to health and safety(please, someone explain that to me?).

Either way i have £150 burning a hole in my pocket and i'm consdering going duel screen.

My reasoning is the fact i bought a cheap TV tuner for the PC to save me forking out on a TV/VCR/DVD , only problem is it takes up a fair amount of screen space, so working or doing any other activities at the same time can be a real pain. However this will be my first step into duel screen-edness so iv got a few questions:

Gameing wise, if im playing a game on one screen, can i still use the other screen for TV/MSN etc?
(games: hl2, UKt2k4, Wc3, battlefield 2, planetside & auto assault - anyone had any experience with any of these on duel screen?)

Can i still run both at their native resolution without any problems performance wise?
(duel core 6300, gig ram, 7900GT, 250gig HD)

Is 2 screens over kill - preferably from someone who has tried it.

cheers guys.


Got one already so id go for this again, fantastic monitor for anyone interested in it;
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/99788

[johnny02004976]

mate i have tri screen (dual screen wasnt enough for my liking ) and its fabulous

once you get dual screen you'll wonder how on earth you managed to live without it. when i go to work and am using just the one 19" tft i have to stop myself from trying to drag things off the screen.

tbh tho when i went to uni i needed every penny i could lay my hands on, you need to ask yourself do i really need an extra monitor, or could that money be better spent at uni....most likely out on the lash.

which ever way you go mate i cant see a downside

enjoy

[MSIC]

Back before I went widescreen I had 2 x CRT's (a 17" and a 15") for mostly video editing. It was slightly annoying having big bezzels, but it worked.
Most games however automatically shut off or blacked out the second screen when you ran something on the first, so the idea of one screen for games and one for other doesnt work.
The only exception to this would be a game that can run windowed, eg Guild Wars.
If I understand correctly however, virtualisation (in the future) might solve this problem (that's a guess on my part).

[chuckskull]

Definetly worth it. I'd have two screens right now but ones borrowed out.

When you're working it's great to have two applications maxed. When you're not, you can have TV/Movie/whatever on one screen and carry on usual internetting on the other. One of the reason i'm so active on forums and various chat networks us because I watch TV with the keyboard in my lap.

Your system will handle it fine. Might struggle a little if you try and watch TV and game at the same time, but I cant see why you'd wanna do that TBH. rest of the time you wont have any porblems. I used to play BF2 and UT2004 with IRC in second window. Of course you have to alt tab out to type, but useful, for moderating etc.

[arthurleung]

Im of to uni this saturday and id saved up a £150 for a fridge, however iv just been told i cant use a fridge due to health and safety(please, someone explain that to me?).

Either way i have £150 burning a hole in my pocket and i'm consdering going duel screen.

My reasoning is the fact i bought a cheap TV tuner for the PC to save me forking out on a TV/VCR/DVD , only problem is it takes up a fair amount of screen space, so working or doing any other activities at the same time can be a real pain. However this will be my first step into duel screen-edness so iv got a few questions:

Gameing wise, if im playing a game on one screen, can i still use the other screen for TV/MSN etc?
(games: hl2, UKt2k4, Wc3, battlefield 2, planetside & auto assault - anyone had any experience with any of these on duel screen?)

Can i still run both at their native resolution without any problems performance wise?
(duel core 6300, gig ram, 7900GT, 250gig HD)

Is 2 screens over kill - preferably from someone who has tried it.

cheers guys.


Got one already so id go for this again, fantastic monitor for anyone interested in it;
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/99788

You can read from the other screen BUT not typing on it. It will require you to jump out of your game to type text. Alternatively you can run another computer (thats what I do)

Dual screen is awesome (as johnny said, 3 is even better). I have 3 computers sharing 2 screens (Dual DVI to one rig, and single to the 2 others).

Sometimes you will want the independence provided by 2 computers so that you don't need to jump out of an application for another one. While sometimes you really need more desk space then you run in dual monitor mode.

And, BOTH Nvidia and ATi have crap multi-screen support. My system can run at least 2 weeks 7x24 straight without problem using single monitor and I basically get at least one BSOD per week when using dual monitor

Watching a 2.35:1 movie on 3200x1200 resolution is pretty awesome if you don't mind the bezel blocking in the middle (most well-made movies don't put EVERYTHING in the middle where it got split)

[chuckskull]

I thought nvidia dual monitor solution was pretty good. Not as good as ultramon though. Ati's is just useless.

[arthurleung]

Ultramon I'm afraid is not good for me. It crashed my system upon startup and I had to get into safe-mode to get it killed off my system.

[UpTheToon]

Just to join in with the dual screen big-up...

I have used a dual screen system at work for the last year or so and will never go back to a single screen if i can help it.

Even if its just to work on one side while checking your email on the other... you'll notice the difference.

[MdSalih]

Go for the second monitor, it's well worth it.

I currently have a 3 monitor setup... and it's made me a heck of a lot more productive. It comes very useful in many areas, I find it especially helpful when programming - can have code loaded on one screen, UI loaded on another and a web browser/documentation page on the third screen.

If you've got a DVB-T, your going to seriously need that 2nd screen.

MdSalih

[Agent]

Back before I went widescreen I had 2 x CRT's (a 17" and a 15") for mostly video editing. It was slightly annoying having big bezzels, but it worked.
Most games however automatically shut off or blacked out the second screen when you ran something on the first, so the idea of one screen for games and one for other doesnt work.
The only exception to this would be a game that can run windowed, eg Guild Wars.
If I understand correctly however, virtualisation (in the future) might solve this problem (that's a guess on my part).

Im going to try with some more games later on, but i dont get that with anything i play at the moment

[Andeh13]

Is it only games that will cause the 2nd screen to go black, or any fullscreen program?

If you run the game in a window, does that still make the 2nd go black?

Are there any ways around it(changing the res, software changes etc) so, so the 2nd screen can be used for something else whilst your playing a game?


thanks for the replys guys, big help

[bertie]

No games that I have played have made the 2nd screen go black as far as I recall (using Ultramon I might add, which did bugger up in the past but recent versions have been faultless).
Like arthur said, you cannot type or do anything on the other screen without it minimising your game, unless you are running it in windowed mode but maximised (indistinguishable from Full screen in some games) which makes it very useful indeed, especially if you dabble in MMORPGS.

I basically use one small screen for general MSN/browsing and the widescreen for games/media viewing - so yeah i'd recommend it - maybe one of those cheap 19" Widescreens?


BTW I wasn't allowed a fridge but I still had a mini-fridge and a george foreman grill in 1st year!
Some people aren't too bothered.

[MSIC]

I'm interested and surprised that no-one else seems to have had the same experience as me.
Specifically, I used to use a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, with probably, oh, nvidia 40 series drivers (and below). From what I remember, I played Star Trek Armada (I & II), Star Trek Elite Force, Star Trek BOTF (anyone spot a theme herre?? ), & Diablo 2.
Be aware that there are some games that are designed (sometimes only at certain points of the game) to specifically prevent you from 'Crtl' & 'Esc' or 'Alt' & 'Tab' ing. Very annoying.

[chuckskull]

It think 40 series drivers might of been something to do with it.

Currently nvidia's multi screen support is very good, you just dont get a takbar on the second screen. Which is a windows problem not nvidias. Easily fixed though.

[dancingmatt]

You can get a taskbar on the 2nd screen, you have to run in Horizontal Span not dualview. But that treats it as one twice-as-wide monitor.

It's fantastic having dual screens, definitely worth it. I've found that in nVidia dualview, games will run on the primary monitor (whichever one you designate as that). You can still have applications running on the secondary monitor (you could monitor fan speed etc), you just can't click on them (which is good, or your cursor would keep leaving the game, or you couldn't scroll right in RTS games etc.)

It's so productive for everything. Leave stuff running, work on two things, browse stuff whilst doing something else, whatever. Think about the number of times you have more than one thing running and have to hop between them. And that's just general use, if you are actually doing something like video editing, web design, or even just something involving lots of folders and files, you can *see* them all and that's brilliant.

I did find I could start a game, press Windows key to send it to the start bar, then swap the primary monitor to the other screen, and when I clicked on the minimised game in the task bar it returned to the monitor it was on - now the secondary monitor. So this might be useful if you have two applications that both want to start on the "primary" monitor.

Do it do it

DM

[Andeh13]

thanks for the responses guys, just ordered the 2nd monitor.

Brought the monitor from the home PC upstairs to give it a go and i am impressed, especially when using ultramon. I can run a game on the primary and TV on the secondry, which works really well.

One problem i have noticed is when i try to run Mediaportal(TV program) on full screen it runs on the primary monitor, is there anyway to make it default to the secondry monitor whenever i run it? Having the mediaportal icon on the 2nd screen makes it run windowed on it, but as soon as i make it fullscreen it jumps to monitor #1.

Is there a way around this?
cheers guys.