Can I do a 2nd monitor w/ TV only with my setup?

[mrblahman]

I have two 24" monitor (Came apon the other one from a friend). Both of them side by side look horrible because my primary one is IPS. I was going to mount the other 24" monitor on the wall near my desk. My dream setup would be to be able to game on the IPS monitor and use windows media center (w/ tv tuner) on the other 24" monitor. Is this possible using Windows 7 Ultimate?

My Video card is a AMD ATI Radeon 4870 X2 (has two HD outs). What are my best options? Would it be best/optimal to just build a seperate HTPC dedicated for this monitor?

Thanks!

Current Setup
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- intel i7 920 (Overclocked+ / Coolermaster V8 cooled)
- coolermaster HAF932
- ASUS P6T Deluxe V2
- Corsair RAM 8 gigs
- AMD/ATI Radeon 4870 X2
- Intel SSD 128gb

 

[Ken g6]

It should be possible to do regular stuff on one monitor and display TV stuff on the other. Whether you can use Windows Media Center specifically I'm not sure, but some software should work.

A separate HTPC would obviously be optimal if you want to game on one monitor. I don't know for sure, but I would expect serious resource contention if you try to game and play video on the same graphics card. A cheaper solution would be to get an extra, cheap (e.g. 5450) graphics card to run the TV stuff - it doesn't take much of a GPU, but especially old GPUs aren't known for doing two things at once well. Then your main resource contention should be on the CPU, where you can put that hyper-threading to good use.

But I would go ahead and try the TV tuner with your existing video first - I have been known to be wrong. (Might want to get a USB tuner if you haven't bought any yet to save space for an extra video card.)

 

[SKORPI0]

I have something similar, 27" Yamakasi LED-IPS (primary) and a 24" Acer LCD (secondary) which is hooked up to either PC or Cable box. I just switch the input to select the source. Works good and I use PowerDVD 11/VLC to play movies Blu-ray movies I have. Or using the cable box and watch TV shows. Not sure how it would work Gaming and watching videos at the same time.

 

[yuchai]

It definitely works as I've done the exact same thing, although I'm not sure about the performance issue as the game I played was not demanding at all.

The major annoyance here is that if you full-screen Windows Media Center, your mouse is "trapped" in that monitor. There's a way around it (hitting the windows key let's you "escape"), but it gets annoying quickly.