I'm a noob, can I use 3x different monitors?

bear_2759 · Post by **bear_2759** » 01 Nov 2009, 23:13

Hi Guys, sorry if I'm creating a new thread for something that already exists, if it does please point me in the right direction because I can't find it...

anyway, I've noticed you all (that I've seen so far) have 2x or 3x the same monitor, can you use different monitors in a 3x setup? I have a budget, and got my hands on some extra monitors so hopefully I can...

what I have is a 21" Viewsonic (16:9) with a 19" LG (4:3) either side. can I hook these all up together and have a decent setup on a budget? I'm hoping so because the monitors actually sit quite nicely next to each other, top/bottom edge almost line up perfectly.

Thanks in advance.

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 01 Nov 2009, 23:41

You can use different monitors with the TH2Go, although a lot of people prefer the same monitors because they match better :).

Although you cannot use different resolutions for each monitor, and so if you have a 19" 4:3 and a 21" 16:10, you have to use the smaller of the two resolutions and have the image stretched on the larger screen.

Using SoftTH you can have different resolutions, although not with TH2Go.

bear_2759 · Post by **bear_2759** » 01 Nov 2009, 23:49

Thanks Dem,

I don't really want to have the image stretched on the widescreen so looks like softTH is the way to go for now. however with the way that it works, I would need to beef up my primary vid card I think... at the mo, I'm using 2x ATI 4670 running SLI. which does quite nicely with gaming... I wouldn't be able to run SLI if I was going to go with multi monitors so I'm guessing I would need to bump up the primary card to, say a 4870x2 :wink: and use one of the 4670's as the secondary. your opinion?

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 02 Nov 2009, 00:22

If you have the monitors, I would simply disable SLI (Crossfire?) and try out SoftTH. It's completely free, and if you aren't satisfied with the performance you should upgrade. But there's no risk trying it out first!

bear_2759 · Post by **bear_2759** » 02 Nov 2009, 00:28

that's wat i was actually just thinking.. so it's the primary that does the work and I would run the 2 19" off the secondary correct? I'm interested to see how it goes with COD4 as this is what I play most at the moment. I should be able to get a decent frame rate if I drop the graphics settings, but if it works I would like to upgrade the primary card, just need to see if a 4870 will fit in my case... does softTH work with crossfire? if it does, I could possibly continue to run the 2x 4670's on crossfire, and buy another el-cheapo pci-e x1 card as my mobo has 2x pci-e x16 and 4x pci-e x1

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 02 Nov 2009, 01:02

that's wat i was actually just thinking.. so it's the primary that does the work and I would run the 2 19" off the secondary correct? I'm interested to see how it goes with COD4 as this is what I play most at the moment. I should be able to get a decent frame rate if I drop the graphics settings, but if it works I would like to upgrade the primary card, just need to see if a 4870 will fit in my case... does softTH work with crossfire? if it does, I could possibly continue to run the 2x 4670's on crossfire, and buy another el-cheapo pci-e x1 card as my mobo has 2x pci-e x16 and 4x pci-e x1

I don't believe that Crossfire works with SoftTH.

You can either run two monitors off of the first card or the second, depending on your preference I believe (it makes more sense to run two off of the primary card, though).

You don't want to get a PCI-E x1 card, because the major bottleneck for SoftTH is the speed for the connection between the two cards. From experience I know that running a PCI card it was impossible for me to get more than 20 fps (regardless of what was being rendered, 2d or otherwise). Try it out with your two 4670s, and then if you feel you need a boost in speed upgrade one of the cards.

Or, better yet, if you think the speed is fine, open up your case and drop one of the 4670s into a PCI-E x1 slot and see what your bottleneck would be.

Other than that, the second card does absolutely no rendering so speed of the card itself isn't really an issue.

bear_2759 · Post by **bear_2759** » 02 Nov 2009, 01:04

thanks mate, I'll give it a crack tonight and see how it goes... kind of exciting, I setup the 3 monitors on my desk yesterday and it looks impressive. just need to connect them now...

Post by **Downtown1** » 02 Nov 2009, 02:41

Yeah, I use 3 completely different monitors since I was poor and bought them one at a time (and the first original mode I had was out of stock and too expensive to buy more of).

bear_2759 · Post by **bear_2759** » 02 Nov 2009, 02:44

well I've only paid for 1 of mine... the viewsonic 2226w and that was a few years back now... the other two, LG Flatron 1954TQ I scored from work... :D ... I'm a cheap bastard, with a mortgage, and 2 kids, and a wife that doesn't work at the moment so any cash I spend, will probably be it for at least the next year (on my current budget)...

bear_2759 · Post by **bear_2759** » 02 Nov 2009, 22:26

no luck... it's probably just config stuff... I have been trying to run COD4 on the 3 monitors. what I ended up with was the right res for the 3 monitors, but the game being really squished horizontally on the centre one. that and not being able to move the mouse past the centre of the screen. let me know if you have any quick fixes, otherwise I'll start a new thread in the right place...

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 02 Nov 2009, 22:30

no luck... it's probably just config stuff... I have been trying to run COD4 on the 3 monitors. what I ended up with was the right res for the 3 monitors, but the game being really squished horizontally on the centre one. that and not being able to move the mouse past the centre of the screen. let me know if you have any quick fixes, otherwise I'll start a new thread in the right place...

What's probably happening is that you're running the resolution of the two 19" monitors onto the 21" one, and it's therefore having to stretch a non-native resolution to fit.

Try seeing if your 19" monitors can downscale the resolution from the 21" one (look in the config settings of SoftTH, although the monitors probably won't be able to).

Otherwise, SoftTH should be able to run the side monitors at different resolutions (although that will require some special configurations of the .ini file).

bear_2759 · Post by **bear_2759** » 02 Nov 2009, 22:35

I actually changed the softTH cfg file so that I was running a 1024x768 res on the side monitors, originally when I tried to start COD4 with the default settings softTH spat out an error that the side monitor doesn't support the 1680x1050 res.

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