I have been trying to get three displays to work together on my PC for a better part of two years. I have tried numerous attempts to get both my PCIe and AGP graphics cards to play with each other in my Asrock 939 Dual Sata2 (the only board that supposed to work) without having some problems, like the PC rebooting randomly (which I thought was bad memory) and monitors refusing to leave standby. I have tried to upgrade to a an Intel board and use a PCIe and PCI combo to give me triple displays only to be stuck in XP. A move to Windows 7x64 brought me back to the drawing board.
Purchasing a HD 5570 changed all that. Well it changed how my monitors work, and it is an interesting journey how Windows 7 X64 sees your hardware or rather plays with it. I have a LG W2261VP and a Acer P225 with two Daewoo HL711A all working fine (today).
The PS3 is hooked into the HDMI on the LG, the Xbox1 plugs into the VGA but if I hook the PC up to the HDMI on the LG, the monitor goes to sleep and never wakes up. Why I do not know. So I have to use a DVI. The Acer connects to the Xbox 360 via VGA and the PC via HDMI->DVI. If I use plain DVI, it too goes to sleep and doesn't wake up. So when you have walked away to make a drink and come back after 10 minutes you have two monitors flashing on and off. It's quite disturbing. So I HAVE TO use this configuration to keep all the monitors coordinated. It is so bizarre.
Now the HD5570 has a Displayport. Can I buy a monitor that has a Displayport and can go higher than 1920 x1080? No, the highest is 1920 x1050, with a healthy price increase to boot, like a Dell or HP offering. So I go look at the alternatives, and there are some real horror stories of expensive adapters that do fail after a few weeks, due to them not being powered properly. Well I got good reviews on the Star Tech Displayport to VGA adapter. It came in the post the next day from Amazon and it is a real treat.
I tend to read a lot of ebooks and I like to play Mame in portrait mode, so before I got the Displayport to VGA I bought a Star Tech USB to VGA. Major disappointment. Great for web surfing or ebooks but movies and games just suck. Real slow. I thought it would be fast enough as a main display but it works as a slave, with good resolution.
I heard that there is a new interface out that converts a single Displayport into six further Displayports, considering Displayports are supposed to be daisy chained.
So is four monitors enough (well five if you include a laptop slave)? I have found I can be twice as productive with two screens, and I am wondering I can be even more productive with four.
Does anyone else have multiple monitors in their setup, and if so what benefits have they experienced?