Adding 5th monitor using usb to dvi adapter

[Mainegunner]

I have a 6950 sapphire running 4 monitors for microsoft flight simulator, 3 in eyefinity mode and the fourth as an extended for instruments. I use the two dvi ports on the card and 2 adapters to run the other 2 monitors. I want to add a 5th extended monitor for a map display. Is it possible to use a usb to dvi display adapter (not off the video card) to run the 5th monitor or would it not work? I want to avoid buying a card with 6 ports due to the cost. Thanks.

[Delphium]

They work well for desktop use, but they dont have much graphical power for 3D content. You might get away with an instruments panel, but I cant say how wellit would run.

You could always pickup a low end internal graphics card if you have a spare pci-e slot fairly cheaply, this would give you much greater performance for very little extra, or maybe even cheaper going by some of the prices ive seen for usb>dvi adaptors.

[Mainegunner]

Thanks for the response. My motherboard has a pci-express X1 slot available, I guess I could install a second card for the 5th monitor. I have never run 2 videocards at the same time. Are there issues I should be aware of?

[Delphium]

Hi, there is no major issues really, from having had a mixture of multiple cards in my system past and present, my experience has taught me this:-

Nvidia + AMD:- works well, but only on Win XP and Win7 as Vista does not support multiple graphics drivers to be loaded at once, when Nvidia drivers detect an addtional alternative graphics card that is not nvidia also, it will disable CUDA and PhysX support at a driver level on the nvidia card, although there is a PhysX driver hack that bypasses this check and thus re-enables it.
This is handy for any games that use PhysX, while you render the game on your AMD card, the physx calcualtions are offloaded onto the nvidia gpu lowering your cpu usage which can give you extra performance on games that support it.

Nvidia + Nvidia:- Try to keep the cards directx support to the same level, ie dx 9, 10 or 11.

AMD + AMD:- Try to keep the card series the same for eample, any HD6xxx, again it is best to keep the same directx level.

EDIT:- I should add that using any addtional cards/usb devices to connect a 5th monitor will not be compatible with eyefinity for a 5 screen gaming setup, for that, you would require a 6 port card, or alternatively you could use the Zotec DP > 2xHDMI device, it acts like a Matrox DualHead2Go device where it spanns the display across 2 monitors.