Video card to support 3 monitors

[junpertys]

I currently have a GeForce GTX 550 Ti.
My question is would it be better for me to upgrade to a card that can support 3 monitors (if so what card would be best) or should I buy another 550 TI and do SLI.

The main purpose is to be able to run a game on one while having up other programs on te others.

 

[KingFatty]

This would depend on what your desired game is, and how smoothly you want it to run with what kind of effects enabled/disabled, and the total pixels etc.

If you can determine that your game is too demanding for that video card in SLI, the decision would be easy to force you to upgrade. But if your game is perhaps older, and you are using lower resolution displays, maybe 550 SLI would be enough to make you happy, except you'd have to upgrade to run a newer game so it's somewhat limiting, especially since it will likely have a small amount of video memory.

I'm not certain, but it's possible that a single budget video card that is somewhat more recent, say a 650 Ti or 7850 overclocked or something, might be able to outperform it, and those cards can flirt with prices around $100 after rebate if you are lucky. So another factor is how much can you sell your existing card for, or how much would it cost to get another one for SLI?