Need a third DVI output for my PC

[Moustiq77]

What I have in the living room:
A fairly modern computer (no SLI) with GeForce 8800GT (2 DVI OUT) connected to:
A monitor (Sceptre, 4:3) for work and playng Sims2
A LED DLP Samsung TV 1080p (to watch DVD/HD movies).

I just bought another one of those Samsungs (smaller size) for the bedroom - for gaming/dvd/hd-movies (yes, I have a long-range wireless keyboard and mouse).

Question. How do I connect the new tv to the computer (yes, I have a long DVI-HDMI cable and an audio cable separately)? Without having to replug the cables all the time.

First I thought there must be something like a KVM switch, but upside-down, to switch between 2 monitors on one DVI. Nope, seems like there is no such thing (at least for reasonable money).

Then I found this thing and similar. So it's like an external videocard.

Question is, if it's a videocard, will it be able to output such heavy content like Sims2 or hd-video?

Or is there another solution for my problem, for around $100?

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

P.S. my 1st post here, so I hope this is the right section of the forum for it. Or maybe it should be over in the home theater one?

 

[ther00kie16]

You could add a second card and then you'll have up to 4 outputs. I don't know if you can pair up two different cards (your 8800gt and a 8800gs or 9600gt).
Generally, if one display (HDTV for movies) doesn't need to run games, the more popular route would be to get a motherboard with integrated video since they all do HD these days. That would give you 4 video outputs with 2 of them good for HD video and light gaming. You are limited to nVidia chipsets since you have a nVidia video card

Good thing is that you can find all of these at $100 or cheaper with HDMI (except for 6150/6100)
AMD CPUs
nVidia 6150/6100 is quite old and would rely on cpu for HD material, which is undesirable if you want to run other cpu intensive things.
nVidia 8200 sounds perfect but won't be released until May. In addition, 8200 would support hybrid SLI, which won't help you performance-wise judging by your needs, but it can shut the dedicated card (your 8800gt) off when you don't need it to save energy.

Intel CPUs
nVidia 7100/7150 are very HD capable but aren't as good as June's Intel G43/G45. However, I don't believe you can add a video card to any of Intel's boards to add more displays.

 

[Moustiq77]

The motherboard is GA-P35C-DS3R (rev.1), so I don't see where would I stick another videocard to. The system is 6 month old only, so I'm not ready to change the motherboard out.

And what about this thing ? Could I just use it to split one of the DVIs between the two TVs to utilize one of them at a time?

Even better. Sinse one of the TVs will be about 30ft away, there are these things: one and two

Any thoughts on these options?

 

[ther00kie16]

All of those solutions are fine if you just want to replicate the picture on the tv.
However, if you want to drive more than 2 different pictures, you'll need a second card. In that case, you would be looking at either a pci-e x1 or pci card. There are some very rare pci geforce 7 and 8 series cards. But they are difficult to find and may be fairly expensive. 6 series cards (mostly 6200) are more abundant in pci but may not be powerful enough.