Dual screens

[Spongebob]

I was thinking about hooking up an extra LCD monitor to one of my systems since a have a couple extras laying around the house collecting dust. I've never tried this before so if I'm running Win Vista and I have a video card to support it, do I need a special split cable or something of the sort?
Is there any advantages to having 2 monitors for one system? Do any games or software support this or is this question irrelevant? Also is 2 the max?

[Hose]

Re: Dual screens

I was thinking about hooking up an extra LCD monitor to one of my systems since a have a couple extras laying around the house collecting dust. I've never tried this before so if I'm running Win Vista and I have a video card to support it, do I need a special split cable or something of the sort?
Is there any advantages to having 2 monitors for one system? Do any games or software support this or is this question irrelevant? Also is 2 the max?

1. No splitter cable (except special dualhead cards which are designed to run on a dongle "Y" cable)... you will need a "dualhead" video card... it will have 2 ports, one for each monitor.

2. Make sure the video card has a Vista driver.

3. Having 2 monitors is sometimes very useful. SOME games support dual monitor, most do not.

4. With multiple monitors, you have what's called "Extended Desktop"... one desktop spread over all of the monitors. You can have multiple windows open, each running a program... you can have one program span more than one monitor.. virtually anything you can imagine.

5. I don't know what the max number of monitors Vista allows, but Windows XPs max is either 8 or 9. (NT had a max of 16!!)

Good luck,

Hose

[bobin8ter]

Re: Dual screens

I have used dual monitors on a friends system, it was great to have the game on one monitor and chat, skype or tips/tricks webpage open in the other monitor.

I am thinking about getting a cheep second monitor - but I don't have the desk space right now.

[Kheldar]

Re: Dual screens

on xp the max number of screens is 10

works well :D

[Yawgm0th]

Re: Dual screens

Almost all modern single video cards have multiple outputs and support dual-monitor configuration. With the use of auxiliary video cards, this number is limited only by the operating system and number of available expansion ports, which in both cases end ups limiting to about ten.

Play Supreme Commander using dual monitors. There's a noteworthy advantage in that. Or try some heavy multi-tasking in full-screen applications, e.g. having a couple Adobe apps and a web browser open all at once. The workspace can be very useful. I wish I had a two-monitor setup for Adobe InDesign and Photoshop at school, and I've even found myself doing things at home that could benefit from having two monitors.

[Spongebob]

Re: Dual screens

Just got around to plugging in the second monitor. I bought a long DVI to VGA cable expecting it to work but had a purplish screen. Next I tried DVI to DVI but had nothing. Is there a setting that needs to be used for true DVI capability? Anyway I went back to the monitors original VGA cables with DVI/VGA adapters that came with the video card and it works fine. I sure would like to use one of those other cords because these short VGA cables that came with the monitors are a tough stretch to my second monitor that I have resting on a shelf above my main monitor.

How would I get 10 monitors working if I only have 2 DVI outs and and S-video out on my video card? Seems to be a severe lack of outputs on the video card for that.

[steve_hb]

Re: Dual screens

When we say XP supports 10 screens, we mean you also need the graphics hardware to run said displays.

The only (consumer) way I could think of off-hand would be to get a 680i running three PCIe cards (2 each) and get another 2-4 ancient PCI graphics cards (ugh). Server/rackmount systems specialised for multi-display would be the enterprise option.

I run two displays off my 7900GT (Dell 20" WS and my old BenQ 17") and it's a dream. I feel constricted in my workspace whenever I have to go back to one screen.