Widescreen Gaming Forum

I currently have a 3 monitor landscape setup which I love. I'm running triple SLI. I was considering adding a fourth display on top.

1. Do people who have actually done this find this setup useful?
2. Does it work ok to run the fourth monitor off of the SLI cards, or does your FPS frame rate drop too much?
3. Could you run the fourth monitor off of motherboard dedicated graphics at the same time so your SLI cards don't lose any frame rate power?
4. When you're gaming can you even interact with the fourth display, or does it always require an alt + tab to see the monitor?
5. What do people use the fourth monitor for (besides over the top geek coolness)?

I would appreciate any advice or experience you could share.

This is just my opinion

1. If you want to multi task, browse internet, set music, hardware monitoring while gaming.
2. Yes this is the easy way to do it assuming you have a mid to hi end 600 or 700 series (650 sli min)
3. If mobo has multi monitor (set in bios) support but wouldnt that load up the cpu by using the onboard graphics (CPU graphics controller)???
4. No would need to alt-tab if using fullscreen modes.
5. Is great for using MSI afterburner to monitor GPU usage / temps / fan profiles.....

PS I think some flight sim programs (fsx) can use this screen for an instrument panel

I thought I'd reply to my own post, now that I've done some experimenting. I bought a fourth identical monitor and setup a 1 over 3 landscape configuration. This is what I've learned.

Before adding the fourth monitor I ran the Dirt 2 video card benchmark several times for the 3 landscape monitor setup with triple GTX 680 SLI enabled. My average frame rate was 140.7. Then I added the fourth monitor and connected it to my primary GTX 680 card. This is how nVidia instructs you to add an accessory monitor to SLI. My average frame rate dropped to 102.6. That's a pretty big performance hit just to display a desktop on the fourth monitor. Then I tried connecting the fourth monitor to my onboard motherboard's graphics port. I had already installed the Intel display driver. My motherboard has the Intel Z77 chipset. Despite the onboard graphics being set to "Auto" in my BIOS, the fourth monitor did not activate at first. Then I changed the BIOS setting to manually enable the onboard graphics. This allowed the monitor to work, though I still had to enable it in the Windows Display Control panel. This fourth monitor does not even show up when opening the nVidia control panel. That control panel just shows my SLI setup spanned across three monitors. But the fourth monitor is displayed in the Windows control panel. I still set the spanned SLI monitors as my primary monitor in Windows. Then I reran the Dirt 2 benchmark several times. My average frame rate was 136.5. Much better!

So if you're running a 1 over 3 monitor setup, try to use the onboard graphics if you have it. It makes a significant difference in your obtainable frame rates for gaming.

Can you try without SLI? I'll see when I can run some benchmarks like this on my AMD setup.

Another thing you might want to test is turning off aero. When running a 4th mon on the sli configuration it will double the amount of vram needed for those effects. I personally run 1 over 3 with 580's in sli and a 210gtx driving my 4th monitor, I put anything that requires vram that I want to see on that card cause I only have 1.5GB of vram and many games will max it out or come darn close. The 580's will NOT run a 4th monitor anyhow, but since I encounter high vram loads in many games, this makes logical sense to me that the 4th monitor would use up these resources and cause a dip in your FPS.

Also I do NOT recommend running MSI afterburner. I use EVGA's precision X and it's pretty much the same program just with a different skin. The reason this is not recommended is because I found it to cause problems with many games that I play like Skyrim and Sleeping Dogs. In Skyrim the sli would stop working and only 1 card would be running at full tilt and in Sleeping Dogs it just wouldn't boot with it running. Thus just don't deal with it and use GPUZ instead, it will only show one cards info but if you're only worried about temps, use speed fan.

This is how everything looks with my current configuration. http://i.imgur.com/aEyCljD.jpg

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