Two Monitors - 1 Graphics Card

[ozrica]

I have a customer with a 640MB BFG 8800GTS graphics card.
He plays a lot of games.
He already has a 22" monitor attached but want's to add another one.

He has an MSI P7N 750i SLI motherboard.

The question is. Will a second monitor slow down the card for gaming?

or

Does he add a cheap second card (not linked via SLI) to output to the second monitor?

Comments and advice gretfully appreciated.

[Platypus]

What does he want to display on the second monitor? If he wants to have individually rendered game action like different views on both, the card will have to do twice as much work. How much effect this will have depends on how much headroom the card has in any given game. If he plays games so demanding that they stretch an 8800GTS, then the extra load will slow things down. But if a game taxes this card, a second budget card isn't going to be able to add much to the mix. And the CPU (which will be processing more data anyway either way) may benefit less from a second budget card if that card is less capable and the CPU can't offload as much processing to it.

If the second screen would be for straightforward 2D desktop display, like browser, or productivity software, this would create little load, and a second budget card could handle it easily - but then so could the beefy 8800GTS...

[ozrica]

Thanks for the reply.

He mostly plays Guild Wars and other multi player online games at MAX resolution.

The second monitor will just be for 2D apps and not gaming.

The system he has (basic stuff) is as follows:

MSI P7N 750i SLi Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
2GB Corsair TwinX Dominator Memory
3x750GB Samsung SATA hard drives RAID 5

[Platypus]

Then I suggest he try using the single card, he'll probably find it can cope, as it's a very capable card. If he does find the game performance sags when there's activity on the other screen, he could try using a second card. But part of any effect on the game would be due to the extra demands on the CPU too, not just the video card(s).

[ozrica]

Platypus.

Thanks for the advise. I'll let him know.