Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hello everyone,
First Day on WSGF
I am working on setting up a Nvidia surround triple monitor to work out my two GTX 970s that I just bought. I also bought an awesome Asus VG248QE to complete the upgrade. What I'm looking for are any suggestions for side monitors that would not degrade the experience or cost as much as two more VG248QEs. I was thinking that in order to save on cost I would use two cheaper 144hz monitors or even use two 60hz ones for the sides as I doubt my framerates will reach 144 when running all three. I would only use the one monitor for more competitive gaming anyway and while I'm interested in 3D vision later, it isn't a priority. Has anyone tried using lower frame rate monitors for the wide panels to save on cost and what secondary monitors worked well for you. I am already aware of the limitations of nvidia surround, 3D vision, etc. I just want to know what others have experienced with this kind of setup.
Thanks.
Jeremy

Hi,



If you're using nvidia it's not reccomended to use different monitors! At least they're supposed to have the same sync polarity.
Might be that my info is outdated here as i don't use nVidia but you shoud inform yourself about that topic a little more.

_________________
We gonna send it to outa space!

thanks for the reply. I have been researching the requirements for surround, but i had never heard of problems with polarity before. I am not against using three identical monitors seeing as they would be 144hz and low latency, but Im having a difficult time justifying the expense. I had an Acer 60hz 1080p monitor beside a 60hz 2048x1152 monitor. As an experiment I was able to surround both of them by lowering the second one to 1080p so I thought there would be few problems. I already know that the screens will need to be running identical resolution and refresh rates for nvidia, and i would be fine with dumbing the center monitor down to 60 hz for some games, and only 144hz for single moitor or competitive games. I am still wanting to know if people have done this, with what monitors they did it with, and what the experience was like. thanks for informing me about the polarity. if i do proceed with buying different monitors, ill will be sure to get those specs if i can first.

I have done this in the past with mixed monitors, an Asus VG278H for the primary and 2 Samsung's (sorry I don't remember what specific model they were...I've had a lot of different monitors over the years) for the surround monitors. It worked, but was not even remotely worth the hassle. Configuring things to work was a pain, there were occasionally strange results when changing resolution/refresh settings and once you go surround you no longer have access to color profiles for individual monitors so things never matched up even close to correctly from monitor to monitor.

Of course it's your setup to do with as you please, but from a headache perspective I STRONGLY urge you to do as Haldi suggests and stick with the same model monitor.

Hello everyone. Thanks again for your replies. I did finally just pull the trigger and bought two more of the same. A bit expensive, but given the reputation of these monitors and my new pc upgrades, I don't think I will need to purchase anything else for a while... We'll see how that works out. I also bought a triple monitor stand off amazon but as it turns out I prefer the monitors on the stands they came with.
After searching the internet it seems that there isn't much information on sli setup with three monitors but I can share what I found. The Nvidia settings for sli have three options for triple monitor setups and there's little to no current information about where to connect your cables on newer cards. The instructions that I find were for 680 cards, but the way Nvidia tells you to set it up for 2d surround is to *Preferably* connect two monitors to dvi on the "Master card" and the third to a dvi port on the second card. This setup works great except when you use your pc out of surround. If you want to set the computer to maximum 3d performance SLI you become limited to the monitors connected to a single card. You can work around out by selecting enable all displays on the Nvidia control panel, but the notes there seem to imply you don't get all the benefits of sli in that setting. It also isn't very smooth transitioning from surround to this setting either and you have to reorder your monitors frequently. What I determined for my setup, at least with the 970s, is that you can plug all three monitors in to the first card, which allows the use of Maximum performance SLI as well as 2d surround with no performance drop. I don't know if this is due to new drivers or better cards, but as of yet I haven't seen any difference between this and the preferred hookup option Nvidia recommends. It also significantly smooths transitioning between surround and standard SLI when all three monitors are attached to a single card. I don't know for sure the reason here, I have my theories, but results are what matter.
Thanks for your responses, I'm glad I went with the identical monitors because it looks and works fantastic. If I have the opportunity I will post a picture of the setup here. Thanks again.


FINAL SETUP
Asus VG248qe
AMD FX-8350
Asus Sabertooth 990FX r2.0
2x EVGA 970 (SLI)
24GB 1866 DDR3
Samsung 850 Pro 256 GB
Antec DF-85

Glad it worked out for you Codemaster.

I currently use VG278HE's with 2 GTX760's in SLI. I use the recommended setup of 2 DVI connections in card 1 and 1 in card 2. My solution to the limitations that you outlined (which have been Nvidia issues for pretty much as long as I can remember) is that I just leave my computer in Surround mode 100% of the time. I'm probably losing some level of performance, but I just can't go back to using a single monitor for anything!

I thought 24" monitors were huge side by side haha. Anyway I never had problems on the desktop in surround. It works well there but when I play games like WOW or Skyrim I cant deal with the bad menu and UI support for surround. So setting it up this way allows me to play The game on the center and still have a browser or music up on the sides. I need to compare framerates between all the setups though to find out if in all reality I'm not using SLI the way it is now.