Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hello all! First time poster here, hoping to get some good advice. I will have cliffnotes at the bottom.

About 4 years ago I bought some kind of stock windows 7 desktop and two 23" acer monitors.

I've been using the computer as a dual monitor setup, with World of Warcraft on one and youtube or twitch on the other usually. This setup has been great for me, however I recently got to thinking: "what's stopping me from having three 23" monitors"?

However, I don't know enough about computers, graphics cards, etc to know what actually is stopping me.

So here are all my current specs:

Desktop:

HP Pavilion HPE h8-1110 PC
2nd Generation Intel Core i5-2400 processor
8GB DDR3 system memory
Nvidia Geforce GT 520 graphics card with 1GB DDR3 dedicated memory
1 TB hard drive
Windows 7 premium

Monitors:

Acer S231HL bid 23"
vertical refresh rate - 50HZ-75 HZ
horizontal frequency - 64KHZ - 83KHZ
max resolution - 1920 x 1080
contrast ratio - 1000:1
dynamic contrast ratio - 12,000,000:1
response time: 5ms

My goal is to be able to run World of Warcraft across all 3 monitors (probably not that practical, but it's kind of a "oooh" factor I've always enjoyed seeing) and still have decent frame rate. I assume meeting this requirement will also allow me to multi-task things like Netflix/Twitch/etc on separate monitors. My budget is $1500. I would prefer to spend the least amount possible though unless absolutely necessary.

I'd also like to be able to stream to twitch, while playing WoW on one monitor. I assumed this would be covered by any machine that could run wow across all 3 monitors, but maybe not.

My current graphics card (nvidia geforce gt 520) doesn't have 3 ports, so I know it's currently not an option to run triple monitors.

I think my options are either to buy a new graphics card, or to upgrade the whole PC. (maybe I could simply buy another GT 520 card and run them together?)

I'm open to any and all suggestions as far as graphics cards, computer upgrades in general, monitor upgrades, etc.

TLDR;
-currently run 2 monitors
-want to run 3, play world of warcraft across all 3
-not sure what purchases need to be made
-looking for all suggestions

thanks a ton guys

If you already have 2 of the same monitors it' recommended to buy a third exact same model.

Your processor is on the lower end, but will probably be fine for another 2-4 years, you could try overclocking it a little.

One thin i'd definitly have bought ages ago, a SSD 128gb cost around 60-80$ nowadays, and thats enough for the Operating System and one or two games.

I'm not sure if SLI 520 works, AFAIK Nvidia Cards need an connector cable for SLI called the "SLI bridge" i think only high end gaming cards have these connectors.
Good news on this part, new nVidia Cards don't need SLI to run Multiple Monitors, a GTX960 can run 4 Monitors from one GPU.
And a GTX960 is the minimum i would recommend for gaming in 5760x1080 Resolution.
If you don't like nVidia anymore or would like to try out something new the AMD R9-380 would be a nice counterpart.
nVidia Surround or AMD Eyefinity work nearly equivalent fine.

greetings
Haldi

btw

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