Triple monitor setup

[Sylvanas]

Hi All,

Need recommendations for my next home upgrade- what monitors should I buy?

I am upgrading to a new Haswell setup, I currently have one 120hz monitor but would like to go triple 23-24" displays. I will be using this 90% of the time for web browsing and office use (I have dual screens at work and sometimes wish I had one more as I actually would get things done quicker). The remaining 10% of the time I will probably play RTS's and SimCity / watching Movies.

Also, budget is important, I am seeing so many cheaper IPS displays around now that I might aswell jump on that bandwagon. If it is possible to find the best display for <$250 that'd be great. I am a fan of the borderless designs and I assume this would be more important with a triple monitor setup.

Will be using a high end GPU, havent decided yet.

Thoughts?

 

[KingFatty]

How attached are you to that current 120 Hz display? Would you be upset mixing that with two other 60 Hz displays, with the tradeoff of potentially richer colors? I dunno, maybe think if you prefer to just sell it and get a set of 3 monitors, have you thought of the cheaper 1440p ebay (or microcenter) displays?

 

[Sylvanas]

I had planned on selling my current setup and putting that money towards the new one. I like my 120hz display, the higher refresh rate is noticeable even on the desktop, but I dont want to mix and match that would be asking for problems. However, I can live with 3 x IPS 60hz monitors.

What 1440p display are you thinking of?

 

[gorobei]

there are cheap 20-21" ips monitors on sale for ~$130+ range. (frys has had a lenovo 1600x900 on sale continually for the last couple of months ~$110) even some 22"@1080. most are on fixed non adjustable stands and have limited input ports.

the hp and dell 23" 1080p eips models go down to ~$220 ish on sales. generally better on inputs and stands. asus also have some nice budget ips models but they seem to be going upscale in the last year so prices arent as nice as they used to be.

few to none have really minimal bezels, expect at least 1cm on the sides or worse 3cm lower bezels on some monitors. if you intend to do 3x1 portrait you need to look for something with a uniform bezel width on sides/bottom/top. if you are only doing 3x1 landscape the bottom/top bezels dont matter.

my 3 dell 2408wfp have really nice stands with full adjustability, height is the hardest one to get matched.

 

[KingFatty]

I was wondering if you thought about going for a specific monitor size or pixel height? I myself would be thinking about going with 3x inexpensive ebay catleap or equivalent 27" 1440p monitors, however some people feel that most games look a little distorted at the edges in triple-screen gaming on 16:9 aspect ratio screens in landscape mode. I disagree, because you will focus on the center screen and rely on side screens for peripheral vision, but now I'm second guessing myself. I dunno, I think it's inevitable that I'll end up with at least one 1440p display, and maybe try to frankenstein something with a mixture of other displays and see what that's like (which may force me to use AMD, though I'm hoping Nvidia will add support for mixing/matching different monitors for multi-screen gaming.

 

[guskline]

I'll chime in and let you know that I ran 3- 24" 1920x1080 Acer LEDs and the single biggest factor is the video card. I first had a Radeon 6970, the a Nvidia GTX680 and finally 2 GTX 670s in SLI. If you are not gaming the fps issue isn't as bad. Remember, with 60Mhz 1920x1080 on 3 monitors you are effectively a 5760 x 1080 resolution (3x1080). If you jump the speed to 120 Mhz you really jump the horsepower needed. Also if you jump to 2560 x 1440 your resolution for a 3 monitor system jumps to 7680 x 1440!

I had my 3 24" Monitors for @1 year and sold them to go to a single 27" 2560 x 1440 panel. I have no regrets. Sylvanas, I would suggest either a GTX 780 with the increased vram or perhaps an AMD 7970. My dual 670s helped the fps in 3 way immensely but vram becomes an issue with that much resolution with 3 monitors.