Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hey guys, been getting back to my nerd roots the last couple years, dabbling in Android, Thinkpads, and several months ago, built a new gaming rig. It looks like the costs of multi monitor setups are coming down to the point of being attainable for regular people nowadays. Came across your site while looking into the subject of course, and registered.

Now, on to my question...

It seems as if 3x Full HD (1920x1080) = 5760x1080 resolutions seem to be the most prevalent, and widely supported. But IMO, 16x9 is an abomination! I'm sorry, but, I just cant do it! I must have 16:10 monitor(s)! Am I going to cause myself undue pain by trying to move forward at one of the following resolutions?:

19" monitors x 3 in landscape @ 1440x900 = 4320x900 total
24" monitors x 3 in landscape @ 1920x1200 = 5760x1200 total

-or-

I might consider (5) 19" monitors in portrait... if I could find some with thin bezels...

The reasons I am thinking either 19" or 24" monitors, is because they are(/were) pretty common sizes, and readily available (and therefore, cheap!).

Cost honestly is a concern, I don't want to spend an arm and a leg on this. I do not need to play all of the latest games on the highest settings. In fact, I want to do it more for office and general productivity, and then play a couple games here and there (currently playing Planetside 2, and will be playing Star Citizen when it comes out, are two that come immediately to mind; hell, I'm just now playing through Fallout 3 for the first time, lol). Also I tend to pick up things as I come across good deals, and add to my system piecemeal over time (more on that later).

But back to the monitors. So my initial questions are:

1.Is my assumption correct that those are/were fairly common monitors during their time, and therefore likely to be readily available at the current time, with a little life left in them, for not too much money.

And my main question:

2.Am I going to run into a lot of problems trying to go 16:10 route instead of 19:6? Eg., I know some games natively support multiple monitor setups, but is this a hard set value (i.e. 5760x1080) or is it usually configurable? Would I just end up letterboxed, or would I have my full screen height?

1. I don't think you will find lot of 19" monitors. 1920x1200 are way more common.
You might find them on ebay!

2. AFAIK most games that support 16:9 in EF also support 16:10 but I can't give any guarantee on that as I do not own such a system.

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We gonna send it to outa space!

There are quite a lot of 19" monitors in my area (Tampa, FL) on Craigslist for super cheap (~$30-50), actually! eBay, by comparison, is much higher for same ($60-80) (likely due to shipping costs, whether separate or built in).

But that's good news, I always wanted to have (3x) 24" (1920x1200) monitors. Still out of my budget though, even used (least expensive decent ones on CL around here ~$100/ea). Many on this site may laugh at me for being a plebe, but even $100 x 3 = $300 is more than I can spend just at the moment.

So, this thread is going to be for all of us nerds who aspire to a triple/multi monitor battle station, but who want/need to do it on the cheap!



Yeah, the more I read, support seems to be very dependent on the specific game(s) in question. Well, lucky for me I only play a couple games, primarily this will actually be for productivity (as outlined above).

How about 7680x1440 ?

I just got 1 then 2 more Qnix QX2710 monitors (16:9) with a native res of 2560x1440 for around $300 USD each with free 2-3 day shipping from Korea. They're set up in Nvidia surround for a res of 7680x1440. These monitors are so big (27"), I don't miss my old Samsung 244t 16:10 screen that recently crapped out. My highly overclockable system (ASRock Z77 OC Formula motherboard) has a pair of EVGA GTX670 FTW+ 4GB in SLI. I'm currently running the surround at 75hz and hoping to be running 96hz shortly, once I get the Nvidia software convinced to run it (it's a bit flaky). Some of these QX2710 overclock to 120hz+. The success varies from monitor to monitor. One of mine hit 120 no problem, the other two will only do 96hz, but I may, by tweaking the settings, get them higher. The models with only a single DVI dual link port are the overclockable ones. The ones with multiple ports (DVI, vga, HDMI etc.) are not, so I guess those are stuck at 60hz.

These Korean PLS panels (Samsung's version of IPS) are a real bargain to consider, but remember to handle three of the overclockable ones your system must have three DVI (Dual link) ports.

Never had any problems with 5040x1050 (3x 1680x1050 (3x 22" 16:10)).

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