I'm looking to set up a triple monitor system, but I'm unable to find any resources on the details of how to do so. I'm cool to drop in a cheap second video card in order to drive the third display, if needed, but I don't want to drop a huge amount of money. Matrox's triple head thing, apart from being too expensive, won't actually handle 1600x1200, as far as I can tell. The three displays are all different resolutions anyway. Anyway, some explanation of how to do this would be appreciated.

As you probably already know, Jeff Atwood has written a few blog posts on the subject. In one he discusses the Matrox TripleHead2Go, but in the other he mentions a couple PCI video cards that may do the job.

One word of caution: My roommate uses a PCI-X main card for the first two monitors and a PCI-old card for the third monitor. Both cards are nVidia, but the older card is not included in the latest driver package. This causes him major headaches and he has to disable the third monitor when playing games. He is using Windows XP Pro SP2.

Hmm. I have an SLI motherboard. Can I use two PCIe video cards instead of PCIe and PCI?

Quote: Original post by Promit
Hmm. I have an SLI motherboard. Can I use two PCIe video cards instead of PCIe and PCI?

I've seen it done. It is supported on the Mac Pros (though I don't know if it's "SLI" over there), so it should be supported under Windows.

According to this thread, it obviously disables the SLI support.

Additional threads on this topic: 1 2

I recommend the 8800GT; it's an excellent card.

Another person to talk to is cow_in_the_well (here on GameDev). He's got a triple monitor setup.

*raises hand* I have 3 monitors too. Check out how I did it in my journal. If the link doesn't work then it's the Sept 21st entry. I'm using two ATI cards, both PCIx. Awesome.

I should just tell you in IRC but I want to +1 the old post count.

As you know I was running triple but was having massive problems, especially when using DX10. That was running an 8800 and a 7900GS though mind you.. which isn't the ideal situation. If you are going to run two 8x00 series cards than that would work just flawlessly, if you are going to use an 8x00 with a previous generation you get undetermined behavior. I was crashing all over the place with DX10, even DX9 the odd time.. also sometimes just in normal operation.

When I was using it there just seemed to be too many bugs in the unified driver for the odd setup of having a DX10 and a DX9 part... and I doubt those are high priority bugs.