Multi-Monitor setup (3 or more)

[JoeChicken]

I am looking into getting a multi-monitor set up for my gaming machine at home. I know about Digital Tigers and a couple other companies that offer this type of setup service. What I would like to know is:

1) Are these good options for gaming?
2) How many monitor cables do these setups have? Just 1 or one/screen? I would assume just a single cable for the entire setup because who has a top end gaming GPU that has more then two slots on it?
3) What other companies out there provide custom screen set ups? And which are the best?

Thanks for any suggestions/comments any of you are able to provide.

 

[Cheetah8799]

Gaming with multiple monitors is tough because most games don't support it. In the end you end up having to disable the extra monitors for some games to work properly.

 

[Cheetah8799]

Oh, and you can have a PCI and AGP card in your computer, set the BIOS to boot from PCI. Then in Windows you set the AGP to your primary display adapter, then pick the monitor you want as primary. That way any games that are friendly with multiple monitor setups will default to your good AGP video card and the monitor you prefer.

With the PCI and AGP cards you'll be able to have 3 monitors for sure if you have a 2-monitor capable agp card. If you go with a Matrox dual head PCI card you can probably get 2 instead of just 1 on the PCI card.

anyway, just some thoughts.

 

[fisheye]

doubt it would be a good option for gaming, as virtually no games have multi-monitor support.
besides, what kind of graphics card could drive 3+ high-res displays during gaming? the effective resolution would be incredible.
I'm sure there are more technical limitations to this kind of setup.

 

[cubby1223]

Matrox made a triple head card designed for gaming - the only problem is you have to buy a Matrox card...

http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/bugeye/home.cfm

 

[JoeChicken]

Thanks for the input. I'll prolly just stick with the single LCD I was planning on getting anyway and adding a 42" Plasma on my wall above that sometime in the near future for other things other then gaming. Thanks again, the multi Vid Card set up suggestion was a big help as well, things to keep in mind.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had a pretty-sweet triple-monitor setup at one time, but it's totally ineffective for gaming, until more games start to directly support multi-monitor setups. If the game runs in a DirectX full-screen mode, it defaults to the primary display, and you can't use the mouse to switch to an auxilary display anyways, since the full-screen app has captured your mouse input as well. If you run the game in a window, you could stretch that window across all three screens, but performance would suffer horribly, as all blits would have to be emulated, since the blit region crossed display-hardware boundries. There is a mode available on NVidia-based cards, "span mode", that can treat both video-outputs of a dual card as one giant single extra-wide display-device in Windows, so you could get full-screen dual-monitor gaming going on something like that, but it is limited to only two, not three screens. The only triple-screen one is the Maxtor one mentioned, but its gaming performance lacks compared to high-end cards from other mfgs, and it is fairly expensive as well.

For originary desktop usage though, multi-mon is very sweet.