Looking for mid-range SLI gfx cards for 3 monitors

[AZReDWiNG]

Hi all,

As a poor, starving college student, I've been out of the loop on the hardware market for some time now. Right now I am sporting a dual screen setup with a single GeForce 8600 GTS. Pretty new at the time, and a little old now. But thanks to Uncle Sam, I have a little more cash to spend.

As a student in aerospace and computer engineering, I am looking to join the three-monitor club. I do a lot of CAD work and programming/simulations with MATLAB, C, etc. My dual monitor setup is good, but I find myself really needing a third monitor (one monitor for, say, finding references online or something, one for programming, one for simulation/running the program).

Thus I am looking for a pair of midrange nVidia gfx cards: something not too expensive and yet packing somewhat of a punch. I am interested in some gaming, but for the most part I am looking only for something that can run SolidWorks and some finite element analysis software. The single GeForce 8600 is doing fine on both. Note that I am running Ubuntu Linux, so peripherals such as the Matrox TripleHead2Go is out (no real Linux support). I do my CAD work in a virtual machine, and I can run Steam just fine with Wine. I'd like to be able to run GTA4 off Steam, and I assume that since Wine can run Steam pretty much perfectly it should be able to run any game off Steam as well.

Thanks a lot for your help!

EDIT: it's an 8600, not a 6600

 

[AstroManLuca]

What is the rest of your setup? If you have dual 6600s then you probably have a pretty old mobo/CPU. Then again, you can probably still upgrade to new graphics cards without having too much of a CPU bottleneck.

On the other hand, if you're able/willing to do a mobo/CPU upgrade, you could just get a single video card and just make sure you get a motherboard with good onboard video and use that for the third monitor.

 

[AZReDWiNG]

AstroManLuca,

WHOA! just kidding, totally meant 8600. So not new but not old either.

I'm running an Intel Core2Quad at 2.1GHz (not sure of the family - if anyone knows of a CPU-Z type program for Linux, let me know) and an eVGA 122-CK-NF68.

My mom does want this machine back if I build another, so I'm fine with building a new machine. Perhaps an upgrade to the 9-series (9600)? *shrug* like I said, it's been a long time since I've done this. Haha.

I'm intrigued by the suggestion of using the onboard video for the third monitor. How would this impact graphics for gaming? I know I said it isn't a priority, but I also don't want to limit myself, either.

 

[aka1nas]

You can't run 3 monitors with SLI enabled (on 2 cards, I'll expand on that in a sec), you're limited to whatever you hook up to the first card. The workaround for this is to use a 3rd Nvidia card that is not part of the SLI set for displays 3+.

You're basically looking at 3 cards if you actually want SLI enabled and have all the displays. Or, you can just get a cheap secondary card for the 3rd monitor and forego SLI. If you do the latter route, you could just pair a cheap 6200 with your current card. If you want to upgrade to something faster, than take a look at maybe a GTX 260 and a cheap 8400GS for the secondary card.

 

[AZReDWiNG]

It's fine if I can't run SLI. What I am curious about is how games will utilize two mismatched graphics cards. I took HL2 out for a test spin a couple weeks ago and it spans both my monitors (annoyingly, since the crosshair was right between the monitors) on the single card. I would presume that most games wouldn't span all monitors - but for the games that did, how would the odd-monitor-out render compared to the other two?

 

[aka1nas]

AFAIK, You can't span 3d apps across more than two monitors through drivers with any version of Windows (Vista and Windows 7 no longer support spans at all). You can do this in software with Softth, however. In that case, the secondary card can be pretty slow as it doesn't do any rendering at all.

Edit:

Here's an example on my rig of Fallout 3 @5760x1200

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh...7v7OqQ?feat=directlink

 

[AZReDWiNG]

Having games span 3 monitors isn't a make-or-break, and I'm fine with only two screens. That said, I will look into your suggestion of the GTX 260 and keep my 8600.

While we're on the subject, how does the mobo/CPU look? not obsolete yet I hope, although I have been eying the i7..

 

[aka1nas]

It's the same board I have.

Frankly, it's a (relative) piece of crap and I only have it for SLI support. It overclocks poorly, runs hot, doesn't support 45nm quads, and has a shitty PCI-E implementation (it does much worse in softth than Intel PCI-E 1.x platforms and has less effective bandwidth in benchmarks).

If I didn't need SLI support, I would pick up decent a P45 or X48 board. I'd jump on X58 and I7, but the additional cost for DDR3 blows it out of my budget for the moment.

Your Quad is fine, though I find it difficult to get a stable OC out of this board with Quads. I run a few games where the lack of clockspeed is killing me somewhat (X3: Terran Conflict is single-threaded and massively CPU-limited), but otherwise the chip is aging well. An advantage of many newer games being console ports is that they usually at least scale to 2-3 cores.