- Nov 28, 2001
- 22,205
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Ok I'm thinking that the future, maybe a year from now or so, of extending my current desktop to 3 monitors. Currently I have a 30" Dell 3007WFP which is really nice but I'm going to upgrade my computer at some point down the road and will probably be spending more than a few bucks on it.
With the price of LCDs where they are at now it's not all that hard for me to imagine adding 2 smaller displays on the side of the 30". The question(s) I have are these though. Which size configurations would work best. I've seen others with 30" central displays who get 20" side ones. Does 20" work best because of the height of the 30" display? Or would I also be able to go with 22-23 etc...? Seeing as the 30" display has a native resolution of 2560x1600 by itself I'm assuming that extending the desktop across all 3 I would be looking at running something like 5760 x 1600?
Now powering that kind of resolution is no problem with top of the line cards nowadays so long as all we are talking about is windows but few games are going to be able to run at anything close to that resolution I imagine. And I know that there are aspect ratio problems even with games that can run at these resolutions (which I believe are fixed by a small tool that I can't remember the name of). So I'm just saying that I know that I won't be doing much gaming at these insane resolutions.
Question is then what are my gaming options with such a setup? Can I just output to the central 30" at 2560 x 1600 and effectively turn off the side monitors? Can this be done for specific apps only (like older games and specific apps) but run the full rez on everything else? Would I be looking at rebooting every time I wanted to do this? Sorry for the long post I'd just like to know what I'm getting myself into, and I know there are quite a few people with multi monitor setups.
Thanks for any help!!
With the price of LCDs where they are at now it's not all that hard for me to imagine adding 2 smaller displays on the side of the 30". The question(s) I have are these though. Which size configurations would work best. I've seen others with 30" central displays who get 20" side ones. Does 20" work best because of the height of the 30" display? Or would I also be able to go with 22-23 etc...? Seeing as the 30" display has a native resolution of 2560x1600 by itself I'm assuming that extending the desktop across all 3 I would be looking at running something like 5760 x 1600?
Now powering that kind of resolution is no problem with top of the line cards nowadays so long as all we are talking about is windows but few games are going to be able to run at anything close to that resolution I imagine. And I know that there are aspect ratio problems even with games that can run at these resolutions (which I believe are fixed by a small tool that I can't remember the name of). So I'm just saying that I know that I won't be doing much gaming at these insane resolutions.
Question is then what are my gaming options with such a setup? Can I just output to the central 30" at 2560 x 1600 and effectively turn off the side monitors? Can this be done for specific apps only (like older games and specific apps) but run the full rez on everything else? Would I be looking at rebooting every time I wanted to do this? Sorry for the long post I'd just like to know what I'm getting myself into, and I know there are quite a few people with multi monitor setups.
Thanks for any help!!
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