Preface, I am a noob.
I want to know what is the most logical and economical way that I can use what I have to play video games (WoW, Planetside, GW2) on 3 monitors. I plan to use 3x 19 inch wide screen monitors turned vertically.
I have:
1. x58 triple sli motherboard, its a couple of years old. http://www.evga.com/articles/00438/
2. i7 920 (2.67g)
3. and i have two video cards. a 9800 gtx, and a gtx 460 se.
What I specifically want to know, if I can find the physical bridge piece that I have probably lost, can i just buy two more of these cheap gtx 460's to achieve what I want? Do I need to buy more expensive cards? Can I buy one premium card that would handle all 3 monitors, for the same price or less than 3 economy cards?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, ideally I would not like to purchase more than 2 more video cards, and not spend more than $600 on the solution if anyone thinks that is possible.
I just found the following, does this mean that my board will only support triple sli for a very limited number of old cards?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface
3-Way SLI
NVIDIA has revealed a triple SLI setup for the nForce 700 series motherboards, which only works on Windows Vista. The X58 intel chipset also implement 3-way SLI using an additional NF200 component based on nForce 700. The setup can be achieved using three high-end video cards with two MIO ports and a specially wired connector (or three flexible connectors used in a specific arrangement).[5][6] The technology was officially announced in December 2007, shortly after the revised G92-based 8800GTS made its way out of the factory. In practical terms, it delivers up to a 2.8x performance increase over a single GPU system.[7]
3-Way SLI is possible using all GeForce GTX except GTX 295 and GTX 460 (580, 570, 480, 470, 465, 285, 280, 275, 260). The GeForce GTX 295 does not support 3-way SLI but supports 4-way SLI and Multi-GPU. The 460 GTX was rumoured to support 3-Way SLI but upon release people found the 1 toothed 2-Way SLI bridge, this is because the 460 was not meant to replace the 260, it was supposed to push up the rest of NVIDIA's product line and make the 465 GTX more appealing, but due to heat issues 465 GTX's were considered flops and the mass of gamers stuck with 2-Way SLI 460 GTX. [8][9]
Unlike traditional SLI, or CrossFireX, 3-way SLI was limited to the GeForce 8800 GTX, 8800 Ultra, 9800 GTX and June 2008 introduced the GTX 260, GTX 280, the 9800 GTX+ and also the GTX 275, 285, 465, 470 and 480 graphic cards on the 680i, 780i 790i, certain P55 chipsets, X58 chipsets, whereas CrossFireX can be theoretically used on multiple ATI (now AMD) Radeon cards (up to 4-GPUSs, must have same core irrespective of product binning).[10]
