Surround with 4 Monitors (30" and 3 20") setup

[thegamer36]

Looking for some help here.
I currently have a 30" monitor and love gaming on it.
I wanted to purchase 3 20" monitors and run them in portrait mode. How would I hook up all 4 monitors to the system and easily switch between them when gaming and surfing. I would like to surf the web and play games that do not support Nvidia Surround on the 30" and switch to the 3 monitor setup when games support surround.

Is there a way to do this. I am running GTX 480 SLI currently.

Thanks for the help.

[suiken_2mieu]

Easiest way would be to change which is you main monitor in windows.

[tet5uo]

I think you'd need another GPU to drive the 30 inch.

[fuzioninfinity]

He'd need another GPU to have it active while surround was active, but if he just wanted to run the 3x 30 inchers in portrait without the 4th monitor, then he'd be fine.. Then he could just switch over to "Maximize 3D Performance" or whatever it was and select his 4th 30 incher as the primary monitor and game on that for games without surround support.

But if you don't want to have to deal with the hassle of switching between Surround and single display gaming then yes, you'd need a 3rd GPU - however it doesn't need to be another 480, it could be any other NVIDIA GPU.

[slip-stream]

Just as long as you know that you cannot enable 3DS in portrait mode. 2D surround is fine though.

[Guyver]

I didn't want to make a new thread just for this quick question, I kinda have a similar question.
I have 2 GTX480's running 3 x 24" screens in surround mode, I would like to connect another screen to this setup outside of surround mode that I can go full screen video mode because full screen video mode while using Nvidia surround is a waste of screen space basically.
Going by the responses in this thread it seems I may have to get another graphic card, unless there's been a driver update that allows us to use all 4 DVI ports in the above mentioned configuration.

If another graphics card must be purchased will any cheap-o card will do? Not overly interested in hunting down a powerful single slot(struggling for space in my case) GPU for dedicated Physx or anything like that.

[tet5uo]

Yeah, just get something cheap like a GT 430 and you're good to go.

[_CH_Skyline_]

Yeah, just get something cheap like a GT 430 and you're good to go.

I agree, I'd just make sure it's a card with active cooling as opposed to just a heatsink considering you are already running two hot GTX480's.

[tet5uo]

One thing worth noting, on most motherboards, populating that last slot will drop your PCIE down to 8x, but it's not like it should be noticeable in any real-world scenario.

[Paradigm Shifter]

One thing worth noting, on most motherboards, populating that last slot will drop your PCIE down to 8x, but it's not like it should be noticeable in any real-world scenario.

It matters more in Surround than it does in single-screen scenarios, but it's still not a game-breaker in terms of performance loss. :)