Any one on three screens?

[alienware]

Any one using three screens?

Mate of mine turned me onto it a couple of months ago. Was a pain mind, because the only option I really had was SLI GTX 295.

Thankfully he held the key, he had the second one haha. Didn't take me that long to nag him into handing it over

What sucks though is that as much as I tried I couldn't live with it day to day as the way it lays the screens out sucks.

So I had to build another PC for it

 

[alicarve]

im using 3 screens i like it now i've got used to it, only problem is my 2 460s are struggling with bf3 lol

 

[yassarikhan786]

I've got two screens (19" + 24") and I don't have space for a third unfortunately.

What's running your 3 screens Z0mB13?

 

[alienware]

I got a second Aurora for peanuts.

Mate of mine bought a brand new chassis board and psu back in Feb.

He messed around trying to make his mind up on what to put in it, then when he finally bought the rest of the hardware we found him a really powerful ALX for cheap so he bought that.

Gave it a month and he started to get annoyed with it lying around (plus we had raped it for all the nice bits) so he sold me the chassis psu and board, plus a 920 DVDRW 1tb drive and memory kit for £200. Oh and some weird Zalman cooler.

Was easy then, just toss in my 295s and away. Had to do some small mods for cooling (and rightly so, talk about hot) and I was off.

I'm currently modding it pretty hard so no doubt at some point I will post pics.

 

[alienware]

im using 3 screens i like it now i've got used to it, only problem is my 2 460s are struggling with bf3 lol

That's VRAM. The game eats in excess of 1.6gb in multiplayer.

That's how things are headed now. I would have expected my quad SLI to pull the game's head off, but the game just laughed as it ate over the VRAM I had and the game ground to a halt.

That's why I have a 6970 Lightning in my other PC.

 

[nothingspecial]

Used to have three old 4:3 ratio 1280x1024 screens, but just got a pair of 1920x1080 16:9 now (Benq G2222HDL - pretty good for £100 each).

If I had space for a third I'd consider it, but alas no

 

[alienware]

Did you run them in Surround/Eyefinity?

That's where it's at man ! Totally amazing. Well, once you have spent about an hour hacking cfg files on some to make them display properly.

 

[alicarve]

Did you run them in Surround/Eyefinity?

That's where it's at man ! Totally amazing. Well, once you have spent about an hour hacking cfg files on some to make them display properly.

especially rage for that

 

[alienware]

Dude it makes the game too easy !

I'm sure you remember the Smash TV gameshow bit? where you have to earn a sponsor?

The mutants didn't even get a chance to jump off the podiums lol.

 

[Lollipop]

I want

But i don't think i could ignore the bezels so i'll just get a nice hi-res 26 inch montior

 

[alicarve]

Dude it makes the game too easy !

I'm sure you remember the Smash TV gameshow bit? where you have to earn a sponsor?

The mutants didn't even get a chance to jump off the podiums lol.

it was a bit easy, only because we see whats more around us and a few glitches lol

 

[alienware]

I want

But i don't think i could ignore the bezels so i'll just get a nice hi-res 26 inch montior

Bezels? forget it mate.. After about ten seconds it becomes native. Mostly because it's too wide to see all of it, so you tend to look at the screens independently of one another.

Sure, looking at it static you can see them and they look a bit bad, but once the game gets underway you forget all about it.

Mind you I used to game on two screens many years ago with a Matrox dual head, so it's gotta be better than that

It's also excellent for the driving games. Now I can see the tossers trying to overtake, so I simply ram them into the side rail

 

[SPS]

Bezels? forget it mate.. After about ten seconds it becomes native. Mostly because it's too wide to see all of it, so you tend to look at the screens independently of one another.

Sure, looking at it static you can see them and they look a bit bad, but once the game gets underway you forget all about it.

Mind you I used to game on two screens many years ago with a Matrox dual head, so it's gotta be better than that

It's also excellent for the driving games. Now I can see the tossers trying to overtake, so I simply ram them into the side rail

Driving games are why I want a triple screen setup, I don't even think I would notice the bezels because you would be so focused on the middle screen, you're merely just glancing at the side ones as you would say in a car?

 

[alicarve]

It's also excellent for the driving games. Now I can see the tossers trying to overtake, so I simply ram them into the side rail

haha thats always a good thing to do

 

[alienware]

Driving games are why I want a triple screen setup, I don't even think I would notice the bezels because you would be so focused on the middle screen, you're merely just glancing at the side ones as you would say in a car?

Yes. So tbh if you took away the bezels it would be less natural.

This is Dirt 3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbYm-aO9Dk0

That was during setup, and I had accidentally hit one of the contrast buttons when moving the monitors into place so they are a bit off colour wise.

That's also on the Core 2 Duo rig, which was holding back the 295s terribly.

Here are some videos I did at first for testing purposes.

RAGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv4C72cyOKc&feature=related

Dirt 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX9hOXA2PSE&feature=related

Just Cause 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP5PEQtQmb4&feature=related

Fallout 3 with the high def pack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2AomhEsOyg&feature=related

Obviously Quad SLI is bad enough, but surround just adds to the pain. I wanted to be 100% sure everything I played worked before drilling holes in the walls and spending £27 on brackets.

Note I also chose low resolution monitors. It was because you need to be very careful about resolution. Currently the three monitors run at 4098x768 which added up using less pixels than 1600p. Any more and frames will become the issue. Mind you, price had to be factored in too. Two of the monitors were brand new and the other has a mark on the screen (right side, hardly noticable when playing) but I only spent £130 delivered on all three.

As I said before though, with things as they currently are I would not live with the way it lays itself out as a desktop. It's horrible. You end up spending all day lifting your mouse and redragging it trying to navigate.

When you open and maximise your browser for example it stretches across all three screens. This looks really odd due to the monitors being angled in at 30 degrees. You can't snap windows to just one screen, so you will spend the most part of the day opening windows before manually resizing and placing them in the middle screen. Had I not had the option of buying the second Alienware I would have left it tbh.

This though is why the 7970 is a landmark card. Many won't realise this, but any one who has used triple screens day to day will see it as the godsend it really is. Nvidia aim to tackle this with Kepler, which will allow you to use 3 screens on one card for the first time (and about bloody time too !).

But for right now it's a hack tbh. Basically the drivers tell Windows that you are using two screens, then bodges them together.

 

[alicarve]

This though is why the 7970 is a landmark card. Many won't realise this, but any one who has used triple screens day to day will see it as the godsend it really is. Nvidia aim to tackle this with Kepler, which will allow you to use 3 screens on one card for the first time (and about bloody time too !).

was thinking the same thing

 

[BaMb1N0]

using 3 HP LP2475W IPS displays at primary rig for some time now (2x GTX590). working fine. couldn't do it without them.

 

[alienware]

Do you get the quad SLI bugs on the 5 series?

Basically when I first set it up and launched a game the game would fly along.

Then when a new level loaded I would get like 10 FPS or worse.

It was really odd, but I noticed that if I pressed ALT and TAB and went back to the desktop before clicking back on the game it would fly again

After spending about three days researching it I came up with no answers and actually put the cards up for sale. Then I realised that if I changed the performance mode from Adaptive to Prefer Maximum Performance in the Nvidia control panel it was fine.

Which makes sense, as Afterburner was showing three cores down clocking to 300mhz. Basically when a new level loaded the cards put themselves to sleep and didn't wake up

Amazing just how much Nvidia have broken the 2 series drivers with reckless abandon and not even bothered to try and fix it. You'd think they were trying to force people to buy their new cards or something

BF3 still won't even load on my surround rig. Just goes to a black screen and locks up the whole ruddy PC.

 

[Lollipop]

I don't think i could live with the bezels, but this is the monitor i am getting

But it will murder my 560ti, atleast in fullscreen

Samsung 27" Syncmaster

Linus from LinusTechTips actually made a video about it

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezKQjtM8FdE[/media]

 

[alienware]

There isn't a GPU set up on the planet that could run games on three of those

Funny how many videos you see on Youtube of people running such configs and wondering why the games run like ass even on a pair of 590s.