SLI: How Do You Connect Multiple Monitors?

[rfarris]

I plan on having a central large (landscape format) monitor for the master toon and two smaller (portrait format) monitors -- one on each side for the slaves -- 5 toons altogether.

How do I wire that up? Do all three monitors get connected to the same GPU, assuming SLI? Or do you connect one to the central monitor and the other two to the other GPU?

Would I be better off without SLI, and drive the central monitor with one GPU and the other two monitors with the other GPU?

[MiRai]

Multi-monitor SLI is tricky (and weird), but if you can put them all on a single GPU I might just do that. When I was using 2-way SLI I was able to connect one monitor to each card, have SLI enabled, and both monitors would stay on. Now, with 3-way SLI (and more monitors), it's weird because all the monitors not connected to the main GPU will shut off and that wasn't the case prior to adding in a third card.

[rfarris]

What about the idea of non-SLI, just having multiple GPUs? What would be the pros and cons?

[MiRai]

What about the idea of non-SLI, just having multiple GPUs? What would be the pros and cons?

It's unlikely you're going to get perfect GPU scaling while using SLI, but the 780s and their drivers are pretty good, so I'd expect 180%-190% depending on your settings.

By separating the GPUs you'd effectively have twice the video RAM (since it's mirrored while using SLI) and the full 200% use of your GPUs; but, you'd have to use a special Window Layout which would keep specific clients "attached" to their monitor because swapping clients between GPUs that they're not being rendered on will cause a loss of performance on some level. And if the bug in the WoW client still exists, you can't use DX11 on any monitor except your primary monitor.