Hey guys, I plan on getting 2 other 24 monitors as the tax refund checks in

Since I'll be running 3 1920x1200, I "can't" go with matrox TH2go because of the 1680x1050 limitation but I've heard about softTH while searching.

Here's my rig:

Gigabyte P35 DS3R
Q6600
8800GT
4GB Ram

I know I need another output but my motherboard doesn't have onboard or a 2nd PCIE slot. Is a regular PCI enough for the 3rd monitor (don't know much about the passive thing...)

Will this card be good enough to run LFS on 5760x1200 with good framerate?

Or should I sell the 24 and go with 3 22s at 1680x1050 and TH2GO lol


thanks

Don't think PCI would have the bandwidth TBH - How about getting a different Crossfire mobo?

I noticed I have 3 PCIE x1 slot. Are they any better/okay for the job. 2 24s + 1 new mobo + 1 decent card is kinda over budget

I think you could do 1680x1050 on them with TH2go, wouldn't look as nice though. Like Jakg said, get a crossfire/SLI motherboard. If you mainly play LFS, my opinion would be that LFS doesn't need a quad-core CPU and it doesn't need 4 GB of ram. Save a little bit of money on those two items and get a better motherboard.

I tried running a second PCIe graphics card in a 1x slot... it would only work in 2D, not in 3D. I upgraded to exact same motherboard, but with SLI support, giving me a second 8x slot, which got it working fine.

Quote from Jakg :

Don't think PCI would have the bandwidth TBH

Some motherboards with 1 PCI(-E?) have PCI-E 2.0 and with these, the bandwith is double pumped. Anyways, 8800gt is enough for me that it should work. Its got enough shaders (depends what brand u got) and the chipset is nice.

PCIe 1x does work for SoftTH, although it is a bit slow (see here for example on how to do it cheaply)

I had a problem where, even though I had a second full size PCIe slot, my card refused to operate in 3D mode on a 1x bus. I don't know if there's a way to know if a card will function in 3D on a 1x bus without trial and error testing. My secondary card is an ATI X700.