non-surround maximum number of monitors?

sharknice

sharknice

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How many distinct monitors can an Nvidia card support without doing surround view?

I have 7 monitors I want to run on one machine and I'm wondering what my options are.
I only game on 1 monitor and I use the other 6 at the same time for just general applications. It is important they are distinct monitors and not combined in a surround view.

I want to get two GTX 770s and run them in SLI. With my current card, a geforce 460 I can only run 2 distinct monitors, but with the 770s they can supposedly run 3 in surround and a fourth not in surround. But can they be run 4 distinct monitors? And if they are in SLI can they still run 4 distinct monitors? Are there other nvidia cards that can handle more monitors?
 
What CPU/motherboard do you have? If it has onboard video you could hook up some of the monitors to that.

7 monitors on 1 computer is doable. It is far easier to do with AMD because their high-end GPU's can drive up to 6 monitors. I have 7 on my workstation:


Balanced world at night by rtangwai, on Flickr

What layout are you planning? What monitors are you going to use?
 
rtangwai said:
What CPU/motherboard do you have? If it has onboard video you could hook up some of the monitors to that.

7 monitors on 1 computer is doable. It is far easier to do with AMD because their high-end GPU's can drive up to 6 monitors. I have 7 on my workstation:


Balanced world at night by rtangwai, on Flickr

What layout are you planning? What monitors are you going to use?
Click to expand...

It is actually for a new build. I would prefer to use Nvidia because it is easier to use lightboost and my 7th monitor is going to be a lightboost. None of my monitors have displayport so I wouldn't be able to take advantage of the ATI cards multi-monitor capabilities anyways.
I will be getting a haswell cpu so I'll be able to power 2 of my monitors with that, but again none of my monitors have display port so I can only do 2 off it. The most PCI x16 slots the current haswell motherboards have is 3 and I would really like 4 or more.

Right now I have 6 monitors but I have 4 nvidia cards.

I'm not sure how I'm going to handle the 7th monitor yet. I was thinking about getting a dual mount for the right side of my desk and mounting my rear speaker and a monitor on it. I can always just have it sit there on the stand it comes with too.
 
Any GTX 600/700 series card should do 8 discreet displays no problem by setting "activate all displays" in the NVCP.

I've connected 4 displays to my GTX 680 and it worked fine with all 4 set to discreet displays so games played on just one. I currently have 3 displays connected and use Windows key + P to toggle between Surround and extended desktop mode when I want to play a game. It works quite nicely.
 
There are active single-link DVI-to-DisplayPort adapters for around $30CDN so for any monitors that don't require dual-link DVI bandwidth (120Hz 1080p or 60Hz 1440p/1600p) you can use those to hook them up to either an AMD or nVidia GPU. Dual-link ones are quite a bit more expensive, typically $90CDN.
 
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Galaxy said:
Any GTX 600/700 series card should do 8 discreet displays no problem by setting "activate all displays" in the NVCP.

I've connected 4 displays to my GTX 680 and it worked fine with all 4 set to discreet displays so games played on just one. I currently have 3 displays connected and use Windows key + P to toggle between Surround and extended desktop mode when I want to play a game. It works quite nicely.
Click to expand...

That is good news for me. Does streaming hd video on the other screens while you game affect performance much? I am wondering if I should put them on separate cards like my current system I usually have several twitch streams up on my other screens while I am gaming.
 
sharknice said:
That is good news for me. Does streaming hd video on the other screens while you game affect performance much? I am wondering if I should put them on separate cards like my current system I usually have several twitch streams up on my other screens while I am gaming.
Click to expand...

I had better performance doing exactly what you describe with a 7970 over a 680. I think it may have been related to 2gb VRAM limitation of the 680 vs 3GB on the 7970. If you want to run every monitor super smoothly with high quality video and have enough left over to properly run a game, I'd go with a card that has more than 2gb VRAM.
 
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