Hey I was looking at building a new computer running 2 NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT on SLI, I was wondering if I will be able to run 3 independent screens while doing so?
and if anyone has any suggestions on a motherboard to allow this?
Hey I was looking at building a new computer running 2 NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT on SLI, I was wondering if I will be able to run 3 independent screens while doing so?
and if anyone has any suggestions on a motherboard to allow this?
Yes you should be able to run up to four screens off the two cards in SLi. Any motherboard that supports SLi will do. Look for a new one that supports both PCI-E lanes been at 16x.
Need a sig
Unless they changed things recently, while the cards are actually in SLi, as in sli is enabled, you can only use one monitor.
Now you can probably use the multiple screens with the two cards, but while they are actually running in sli only one screen will be recognized.
Theres a difference between having two graphics cards and running them in sli. Least thats the way it was before.
Edit:
Taken from the SLI wikiCurrently, SLI works only with a single monitor. When switching to multi-GPU SLI mode, Dualview gets disabled under Windows[14], respectively TwinView and multiple screens get disabled under Linux
OK well, thanks for that, I have rethought this idea and I might just go with 2 unSLI cards.
I can run 3 independent individual screens from two GeForce 8800 GTs yeah?
I thought SLI only allowed 2 monitors, hmm...
Project: Elegant-Li *NEW*
Project: Alpha FINISHED
Project: LEXA Revival FINISHED
Project: LEXA FINISHED Bit-Tech MOTM Nominee October 08
i have seen a post with someone who runs 3 monitors for everyday stuff then uses one for SLI. i would stick with the two 8800GT's.
yes, you can run 3 or ever 4 monitors.
CPU: Q6600 G0 3.5GHz@1.4v (4.2GHz max) / 4790k 4.8ghz @1.265v
GPU: 9800GTX /GTX780 hydrocopper
Ram: Samsung 4GB /gskill 16gb DDR3 1600
Mobo: EVGA-NF68-A1 680i (P32) /AsRock Extreme6
PSU: Enermax Galaxy 850Watt /EVGA 850 G2
HDD: OCZ 120GB Vertex4, Samsung evo 840 250GB
LCD: Samsung 32" LN32A450, Samsung 226BW 22" wide
Sound: Logtiech Z 5500
CPU & GPU: 3x Swiftech MCR320, 2x MCP655, MCW60 R2, Dtek Fuzion V2, 18 high speed yates @ 5v
Ya you should be able to hook up 4 monitors to the two cards, just what I was refering too was that they won't be in sli mode when your doing that. When you go to game you will have to enable sli, which when you do that, only one monitor can be used.
When you want to stop gaming and get all your screens back, just turn off sli.
So ya you can run the other monitors, just not technically while in Sli mode.
2 identical cards != sli mode. Sli is a mode/setting.
SLI splits the screen rendering between the cards. One does the top half, one does the bottom half. With 2 x any SLI cards you can run:
1 x monitor SLI mode
or
2,3, or 4 x monitor non-SLI mode (depends on no of outputs)
If you want to run 3 monitors and don't need gaming performance on all 3 you can indeed buy 1 card with 2 outputs and run the 3rd screen on the onboard. Or buy two, run one off each and the third from the onboard.
CPU: Q6600 G0 3.5GHz@1.4v (4.2GHz max) / 4790k 4.8ghz @1.265v
GPU: 9800GTX /GTX780 hydrocopper
Ram: Samsung 4GB /gskill 16gb DDR3 1600
Mobo: EVGA-NF68-A1 680i (P32) /AsRock Extreme6
PSU: Enermax Galaxy 850Watt /EVGA 850 G2
HDD: OCZ 120GB Vertex4, Samsung evo 840 250GB
LCD: Samsung 32" LN32A450, Samsung 226BW 22" wide
Sound: Logtiech Z 5500
CPU & GPU: 3x Swiftech MCR320, 2x MCP655, MCW60 R2, Dtek Fuzion V2, 18 high speed yates @ 5v