performance multimonitor/video card?

dragon · 24-05-2010, 21:37

I had a PCI HD2400 256MB radeon card sitting in a Atom Base Mini-ITX machine, but I found even with the video card the atom was useless at playing a lot of video.

Someone recently gave me another 14" monitor so I thought I might plug my It back into my Main Desktop Pc and get rid of the Atom as I often find when working on the main Pc I always want more open than i have screen for.

Turns out I can fit 2 14" monitors and my 19" one on my desk quite nicely so what i've done at the moment is put the HD2400 In my desktop PC

Which leaves me with the situation I'm currently in where I have my Nvidia GT240 driving my Primary display a Hanns.G HW191D (bit old now but still) and then the HD2400 driving the 2x 14" displays.

I could have done it with the GT240 driving 2 of the displays but my logic was games would tend to only use the Primary display anyway so if my primary display was on the faster video card I wouldn't suffer much of a performance hit. (not that I play that many games or i'd have used a better GPU)

Is there any sense in that or should i disable the HD2400 before i start running games?

MovedGoalPosts · 24-05-2010, 21:55

I think it will depend more on the game, or indeed any other application you are running.

I have a two monitor setup powered by the one graphics cards - ATI 4870. If gaming the main monitor will be doing the game display, but the other screen will still be showing other things like voice comms, and remote server control panels. I still have to ALT-TAB out of the game if i need to use one of those other functions, but it speeds the monitoring process.

Some modern games will use three monitors simulataneously all driven by the one Graphics card. I think ATI call this function eyefinity and it's supposed to give you a fuller immersion wrap around experience.

The point really is that if what you are doing is working then stick with it. If your game starts jumping about a bit, then you'll need to start tweaking settings - or spend some money.

dragon · 24-05-2010, 23:47

Not worth spending money on this pc, It's supposed to be a server.

I'm kind of surprised it didn't die when I shoved 1 video card in let alone 2.

Was one of those cheap ML115 G5 offers that were on last year.

Not what you'd call a gaming machine, although it did run dragon Age quite happily with the GT250.