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Forums -> Multiple monitors -> new to Multi monitors...
Widget   2009-10-24 21:26
Hi all,

Currently have a 9800GT in my PC, and I'm wanting to connect an LCD monitor + 2x LCD TV's to my PC. recently I found out the only 2x screens could be connected to 1x Card (even though my card has 3x outputs).
Just wondering if anyone new whether this was a hardware problem or software and if is were, could ultramon detect the 3rd screen connected ?

If I do need a another gfx card (cant sli/xfire, single PCI-E board only), I heard you can add a PCI card to the machine, though does the chip have to be the same ? (9800 pci-e / 9800 pci, etc..) ?


Thanks
Dale   2009-10-25 00:16
Presumably your current card only has two graphical processors, even though it has three output ports. So only two screens at a time; you just have some flexibility about how to hook them up. I don't know what card you have, but that arrangement is pretty common.
Widget   2009-10-25 10:28
hey,

at the moment it's a 9800GT with 1x DVI 1x HDMI 1x VGA port. I did a bit of research and by looks of it, without getting one of them tripplehead Matrox cards, only other way would be one of the new ATI 5 series card, but get a DisplayPort > DVI adapter.

Is it a hardware or software limitation on all cards that they can only display 2x monitors ?


Thanks
Dale   2009-10-26 01:53
Again, hopefully someone who knows more than me will comment (forum seems kind of dead right now), but I'm 99.9% sure that the answer is hardware. There is a chip on there called a GPU, and you get one monitor per chip. Most cards have (at most) two GPUS.

Now what I don't know anything about is whether you can run three monitors off of a card if you are trying to display the same image on all three screens. In theory, to my numb skull, it seems like that should really only take one GPU. My hunch, though, is that even then one card won't run three screens (although in that case you can probably hook up a splitter, so that you don't need two cards to do it).
Gerhard   2009-11-01 05:22
I upgraded from vista basic to vista ultimate and ever since that my second monitor is not working. I do not even have an option to set it up. Can anyone please help me?
Baer   2010-02-25 13:32
It is not one monitor per chip. There are many cards that have two outputs and can run two monitors that only have one GPU chip. For example, the GTX 280 or 285 among many, only have one GPU chip but they can drive two monitors. All the way back to the GeForce 2 MX cards with one GPG could drive two monitors if the manufacturer configyred then to.It is a case of how much stuff (connections, sockets Etc) as well as the overall resolution that one GPU can run and still deliver good frame rates. The latest cards (the 5800/5900 series AMD and the upcomming GF100 NV series) can run three monitors (we think as far as the GF 100 goes) but one of them will have to be display port. That is because of the manufacturers configuration.
To run three decient sized monitors at their native resolution you really need two cards.If you have smaller monitors and/or can use a lower resolution you can use a dongle aproach such as the Matrox triple head 2 go but that does have limitations.
Forums -> Multiple monitors -> new to Multi monitors...

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