Question about video cards.

[BobGnarly]

I've searched around a little, but I haven't been able to find anything about this specific configuration. I'm hoping somebody here has done this.

What I want to do is buy two 8800GT(s) video cards. Each card will have 2 dual-link DVI ports. I have 3 monitors, a 30" LCD and 2x22" LCDs.

When in windows (and when playing WoW multibox), I'd like to have have the cards operate in non-SLI mode (since SLI can't span monitors) with basically one card for my 30" and the other card handling the other two monitors. I would then run my main window on the 30, and 2 wows on each of the other two monitors. Fairly common setup I'd imagine.

However, when I'm playing other games, I'd like to have both cards go into SLI mode for the 30" only (the other two monitors can go black during this...I imagine they'd have to to be SLIing with the other card). It would be really nice if this was something I could switch manually depending on what I'd like to do at the time (for instance, when I'm playing one char wow, I'd like to SLI).

Any thoughts, experience, etc on this would be greatly appreciated. Anybody done anything like this?

Also any thoughts on running 3 monitors over two video cards in general.

thanks.

[Shigan5]

As for running 3 monitors over 2 video cards you shouldnt have any problems at all, and as for the SLI thing you can turn it off and on in the nvidia control panel and I've read that some users set a macro key for turning it on and off (not in wow of course but on their fancy keyboards)

Now as for the 3 monitors I would recommend putting your 30" on a video card by itself as the resolution you would be running would suck more juice out of that video card and if it ran that and another monitor you might have performance issues, so run the two smaller monitors on the other card if at all possible, and the software end should do everything else for you.

[Chorizotarian]

I've had issues with trying to run WoW on 3 big monitors using 2 8800 GTXs. It seems like PCI-E bus contention is causing framerate slowdowns when I use all 3 monitors. Currently I can only get a smooth 60 fps on my main if I also run 2/4 clones on the same 30" monitor. Ymmv.

Adding 3rd video card = *worse* performance? :( ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=43014&highlight=#post43014')

[ahsen3]

Hello, just curious topic you guys discussing about. Are you guys talking about 3 monitors running by 2 video cards in 1 computer? or two computers?
I am thinking to build a computer to run 4 wow clients.
Here are some questions, can a motherboard running 2 video cards? (sorry, i'm really know nothing about computer hardware) I am thinking building a pc which have two video cards inside, each video card running a monitor. ( 2 monitors by 1 pc which have 2 video cards) 1 monitor for main, another one for 3 wow clients. its this gonna work out? please give me some advices. Thank you very much.

If it's possible please send me a link how the motherboard look like. (prefer from newegg web) thank again.