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#1
Best triple monitor solution?
I'm new here, so hi everyone! I'd really appreciate some advice on setting up multiple monitors under W7 and this seems the best place to ask :) Sorry for the long post.
I'm currently running a dual monitor setup under windows 7 home premium 64-bit using a Radeon HD4770 card (PCI-E). I got hold of a third monitor (so I potentially have a primary 24" widescreen DVI monitor (1920x1080) plus 2 matching 19" VGA side monitors (1280x1024)) and was wondering what the best approach to setting it up would be. I should stress that this is NOT to achieve any triple-monitor gaming, that just isn't realistic on my budget, although I would hope for the best possible gaming performance on just the primary monitor I could get with my hardware. There would be nothing more taxing on the secondary monitors than maybe watching live tv from my standard-def pci tv card, or watching a DVD or video file through media player. I would hope aero stuff would work across all three.
From reading older posts here, and on other forums, there seem to be 3 approaches open to me that may work. All would cost roughly the same here in the UK, around £50 ($80 ish).
1. Install a PCI graphics card to run the third monitor. Only decent one I can find readily available here is the GeForce 8400GS for around £45. Would mean mixing ATI and Nvidia display drivers.
2. Replace the 512Mb Radeon HD4770 with a 1Gb Radeon 5670 + passive DisplayPort-VGA adaptor to run all 3 from the same PCI-E card. Overall cost would be somewhere around £50-60 if I also sold the HD4770 on ebay.
3. Replace my current motherboard and use my current HD4770 card along with an onboard HD4200 chipset in 'ATI SurroundView'. Sell the old motherboard. Overall cost £45-55.
So not much difference in cost, so the performance/compatibility problems are of more concern. Any ideas anyone?