3 Monitors on Inspiron 570

Troman,

You can purchase certain moderately priced HD5XXX series cards what support 3 monitors with certain caveats. But to get a card that can natively support 4 or more monitors, then you need to look at professional workstation class cards which are specifically made for the purpose. You are looking at a cost of $250 and up.

If you are OK with that, look for Matrox, ATI FirePro or nVidea Quadro products. Here is link to one such product that another user that I was helping has successfully used. The nice thing about this product is that you can use existing monitors with either VGA or DVI cables, whereas many of the other choices will force you to buy new monitors with DisplayPort inputs OR force you to buy DisplayPort-to-DVI adapters.

Masi_GC

Thanks for your response.

I'm going to decide between a moderately priced HD5xxx card and a USB video card for 3 monitors but I have a couple questions if you'd be so kind...

I've been told that it HAS to be an ATI PCI card since a PCIe card would disable the onboard video...is that true?

If that's the case, it seems very difficult to find newer cards that are PCI to begin with...that's why I've already gone down the road of trying an older Nvidia 8400GS PCI card and that DEFINATELY disabled the onboard video...I basically went with this one because it was cheap, easy to find, and definately compatible with Win 7

Should I have tried to modify the BIOS in some way to enable the 2 to work together?...I did look around in there and didn't see any options  that were obvious to a layman

Thanks again,

T

Troman,

The VAST MAJORITY of system BIOSes will automatically  disable the onboard video as soon as it sees a video card in EITHER a PCIe or PCI slot. Moreover, it is difficult to support multiple non-identical cards from the same vendor (even if the BIOS allows it). This is because there are many, many versions and subversions of chipset. As a result, during install the driver will detect the type of card and install code specific to that chipset.

USB video cards are OK for static applications such as word processing or spreadsheets, but video performance would be very poor. And don't even think about gaming on the USB video card.

I would suggest that you go with a single card that support the number of monitors that you desire.

Masi_GC

Thanks again Masi

I will take your advice and stop looking for an add-on card and experiment with a USB card since they're relatively cheap and easy and I don't need video performance on this 3rd monitor (it will mostly be for stock quotes / other static apps)

I was only avoiding this to leave room for an option for a 4th monitor but I did some research on these USB adapters and you can get up to 6 monitors with them...as long as you realize that they eat up some resources (I would only need a max of 4 anyway)...but that's OK for me based on what I'll be doing

Thanks again for all your help

T