display port or DVI?

Ok. Looking at the GTX980. It has three display ports on the card. I'll be using three cards in tri-SLI.

Would it be better to have one 980 drive three displays or have a single card drive a single display? This is how I had my tri-SLI GTX580's, one DVI cable went from one card to one display. But with the amount of display ports on the 980 would I see any benefit one way or the other?

I'm just trying to see what would be a better choice as I'd like to do my cable buying and cable management once.

HAVOC said:

Ok. Looking at the GTX980. It has three display ports on the card. I'll be using three cards in tri-SLI.

Would it be better to have one 980 drive three displays or have a single card drive a single display?

You're asking if three cards in SLI mode, one display per card, is "better" (for performance?) than one card driving three displays?

These are very expensive cards, so you're prepared to buy three of them instead of just one?

And they take two 6-pin PCIe power connections each. Do you have a PSU that is large enough and has sufficient PCIe connectors to support SIX of these cables going to three cards (two cables each)?

With three cards that's a lot of electricity to consider and pay for, and a lot of fan noise, and a lot of heat... no?

I'm not a gamer, I've never had a video card this powerful, and I've never run in SLI mode. I am a simple person, and simply drive two displays from my single video card. Two monitors is sufficient for my needs, as is one card to drive both. Sure, it's not as "hot" as two cards in SLI, but I don't need that kind of performance.

Your best advice will probably come from someone else, after you describe your real performance desires. But the 980 is considerably more card than the 580, so with 4GB of memory it might well provide sufficient much stronger performance in one single card driving three displays, at considerable power savings over three 580's.

I'm honestly not really qualified to comment.

AddRAM said:

1 card drives all the monitors :)

Just connect all the cards together in sli.

I'd like to know more about SLI configuration (although I'll never use it myself).

He says his current 580 setup (with three cards, in tri-SLI mode) has one display per card.

Sure, the new 980 card has three DP connectors available, so it could talk to three displays at once... even if it were the only card in the machine.

But if he had three 980 cards, could he not also do the same thing he does with the 580... namely have one cable per card going to a display? Or are the additional two 980 cards "slaved" to the primary 980 via SLI cabling for additional horsepower, and the primary 980 then just has all three monitors connected to its three DP connectors (with no monitor connected to either of the other two slave 980's)?

Are these two valid but different connection options to choose between, either of which can be used and still support three monitors with three cards? And if so, does either approach provide better performance, or is it really identical?

The 980's will be used with the SLI bridge installed. When I had my 580's I was having weird issues with only two cards and three displays. The only way to get rid of the issues was to add another card for tri-SLI. I'm just wondering if I would see an increase/decrease in performance between the two connection methods (DVI or DP). I'm leaning towards using a DVI cable between each card and each display so I don't run into the same issues as the 580's. The max resolution of my display is 1920x1080 so I'm thinking DVI is adequate.

The reason why I had a single card connected a single display with my 580's is that I only had a DVI connection on the Dell display. I needed three cards because I had issues with nVidia surround and the only way I was able to fix it was to install another card. If i enabled SLI one display would shut off. If I disabled it the three displays would work but not be in the position I had them (Left/Center/Right). The left and center displays were connected to the first card and those were the displays that had the most issues. The video cards were fine as I've changed the slots they were in a couple times.

I also used the nVidia surround configuration tool and it didn't help.