1 Video Card+2 Monitors -or- 2 Video Cards+2 Monitors?

[Janix]

Just had a question for you guys. ATM I have 2 monitors hooked up to my 8800 gt. Would it be better to put my old 7900 in a second slot and hook one of my monitors to that for performance? I was thinking 2 wow instances on the 7900, and 3 on the 8800. Would that make any difference in performance/fps, or do I not have a clue what I am talking about?

Btw my motherboard doesn't support sli.

[-silencer-]

If you're using XP, you'll definitely notice an improvement using two videocards. For Vista, you'll probably have an improvement with two cards. And no, you don't want to use SLI for this anyway.

[BobGnarly]

You definitely want to try it out and see what happens if you have the card lying around, but I noticed no improvement at all (under xp, dual-view) adding the second card. My feeling, from reading around a little about dual view, is that the OS is hampering the whole process, so the extra video card was essentially ineffectual. That's just speculation on my part though.

[Kaynin]

Run one monitor for a while, check the performances. Run two monitors on one card, check the performance again. No change? No need to put in the second card. I'd only do that if the first card is getting trouble running whatever you want to run on it. :P

[Shogun]

Just posted this in a related thread, let us know how it goes

No idea if/how this would apply in this case, I have 2 cards with 4 monitors in my current rig, although currently using just 3 screens.

You can run 3d aps (games etc) on the 2 screens on the main gfx card without issues, but throw WoW or something else on one of the other 2 screens and you get a massive performance drop, I'd only ever planned to use the 2 screens on the main gfx card for 3d apps etc as I'd read about this in advance, but I have no idea how it'd affect the kind of setup you're talking about...

Unless someone has endevoured to resolve this issue lately?

[zanthor]

Just had a question for you guys. ATM I have 2 monitors hooked up to my 8800 gt. Would it be better to put my old 7900 in a second slot and hook one of my monitors to that for performance? I was thinking 2 wow instances on the 7900, and 3 on the 8800. Would that make any difference in performance/fps, or do I not have a clue what I am talking about?

Btw my motherboard doesn't support sli.

My experience with XP's video drivers and dual head support has always been that it's pathetic. The ONLY way to reliably game on dual monitors is using span mode, which I don't believe the drivers would support spanning over two cards, let alone different model cards... If you are running vista your mileage may vary, I ran two video cards very briefly and didn't have any problems, but I also didn't see any compelling reason to not just put them all on one card. There are also issues with switching windows from monitor to monitor (PIP) if you do this, since the system then has to transfer data across the system bus.

Also, you would need to identify if your mainboard can actually support two PCIExpress cards @ 16 lanes each. Most lower end boards can't. At best they'll run 24 lanes at a time, which means you get a 16 lane and an 8 lane video card... cut your bandwidth in half and I'm sure you can imagine the performance on the second...