Multi-monitor WoW / single machine

[Stealthy]

My GTX 580's finally came in this week and I installed them last night and took the 5-box team for a spin.

System Specs:
Intel i7 950
12GB RAM
2 x Nvidia GTX 580
3 x Asus VE276Q
Win 7 Pro 64-bit

On the main Window I have the graphics settings at 'Ultra' with shadows turned down to 'Good'. On the alts the graphics settings are at 'Fair' with shadows set at 'Low'. This gets me 30-40 FPS in Orgrimmar and 60FPS (capped) out in other areas.

Resolution in each screen is 3240x1636, with the 4 alt screens aligned along the bottom of the monitor.

Apologies for the crap quality photos - I used my phone to take them.

Flying:


Main screen maximized:


Alt screen maximized - reduced eye candy, notably less vegetation, lower quality shadows.


Cheers,
S.

[F9thRet]

Now that is interesting how you did the alts. I would have never thought about sharing the windows quite like that.

Stephen

[MiRai]

Very nice. I've got 2 vertical mounted monitors myself in my cluster, not sure WTF I've been doing all this time w/o them.

[pinotnoir]

Nice steathy! Are you running those two cards in SLI?

[Kicksome]

Wow, that's a pimp setup. Nice.

[Stealthy]

Nice steathy! Are you running those two cards in SLI?

Yep - for Nvidia Surround you have to run the cards in SLI (i.e. not possible on a single card).

For ATI cards on a dual card setup with Eyefinity, Crossfire is supported for full screen gaming only. For windowed gaming (i.e. multiboxing WoW) you get no benefit from the second video card, and when you're pushing around these kind of resolutions, you really want that 2nd card helping out.

And you can't just disable Crossfire and connect some of the monitors to the second card - for Eyefinity all monitors must be connected to the same video card...so pretty much Nvidia is the only way to go (currently) for this setup.

Cheers,
S

[Nikita]

Im a newb when it comes to computer specs. So here it goes! How many HDD do you have? Do you have SSD installed? Whats the purpous of 2 x Nvidia GTX580? What type of ram do you use?

[Cookiebo]

that looks awesome man...

[Stealthy]

Im a newb when it comes to computer specs. So here it goes! How many HDD do you have? Do you have SSD installed? Whats the purpous of 2 x Nvidia GTX580? What type of ram do you use?

Currently I'm running 2 x 1TB drives in a RAID configuration, but I will be moving to an SSD RAID setup in a few weeks (2 SSD drives already on order).

The technology to run multiple monitors as a single display is called Nvidia Surround or ATI Eyefinity, depending on which manufacturer you go with. For Nvidia cards, you need two video cards running SLI mode to get Surround working. ATI currently have some limitations around windowed gaming (see my post above), so Nvidia was the only choice for this kind of setup.

This is the RAM I'm using at the moment.

Hope this helps...

Cheers,
S.

[Mercurio]

That's awesome Stealthy! Looks quite immersive!