I hope one of you real smart folks can help. I've surfed the web extensively and asked numerous repair techs but have gotten conflicting information. My system is:Dell Dimension 8400 (3.6ghz)w/2GB RAM; Nvidia 6800 PCI Express Video Card (Duel heads)w/256MB memory; running 21" and 17" CRTs (I run separate windows in each monitor not a stretched view); CH USB Pro Yoke/Pedals and Throttle quadrant; 9 GoFlight Modules; TrackIR w/vector graphics. QUESTION ONE: What is the best way to add a third monitor to this setup without sacrificing performance?My computer only has one PCI express socket (being used), no AGP graphic socket and several available PCI sockets. My understanding is that I can remove the existing card and substitute it with a 3 or 4 head PCI express card (Matrox has these at about $700-$800!) -or- add an Nvidia (not ATI) PCI card (w/256MB memory and a processor as close as possible to the 6800 I now have). My concern is that running a PCI card simultaneously with a PCI Express card will cause the system to default to the slower performance of the PCI bus, thus negating the bandwidth advantage of the faster PCI express card. The result would be decreased graphic performance over my existing setup (especially in FS9)! QUESTION TWO: Does the BIOS need changed when a second card is added?QUESTION THREE: Do any power supply changes need to be made when running two cards (as described above)?Help please.R/Mike

Mike,>QUESTION ONE: What is the best way to add a third monitor to>this setup without sacrificing performance?Add a cheap, low spec, PCI graphics card. $5 to $10 second hand should do it!>QUESTION TWO: Does the BIOS need changed when a second card>is added?Other than perhaps to tell your system to boot up using your PCI-E card by default, no.>QUESTION THREE: Do any power supply changes need to be made>when running two cards (as described above)?Not if you buy a cheap, low spec, PCI graphics card.Justification: Your third display will only show 2D windows anyway, so there is no need for any high spec, power sucking, PCI card. I use a 4M Riva128 PCI card from about eight years ago to run my third monitor. Performance hit on the main FS window is neglible (you can see this for yourself by enabling / disabling the card in windows and measure the difference).Gary

Thanks for the quick reply Gary.You mention that the "3rd display will ONLY show 2D windows" Do you mean that you think I would only be using that display to show something like a n FMC or GPS, or map etc.?What if I wanted to undock and drag an external view of the plane and/or scenery (which is a moving 3D image) to the monitor that is running off of the low end PCI card? I do that now with the second monitor that is running off of the duel head card with no affect on frame rate. If, in fact it would be possible to do that, wouldn't it then necessitate a more robust (higher end) card similar to the one I mentioned in my original post? Or do you mean that it is NOT POSSIBLE to display anything but a 2D image on that added card (since my higher end card is PRIMARY)?Mike

Hello,I "fly" with 3 monitors with success for months now!2 Vid cards : 1 AGP and 1 PCI see my sign.

I suppose you can show 3D on the 3rd display, but why would you want to? On most video cards, FS suffers a quite a performance hit when showing 3D displays on two windows, and that's even with dual head video cards. I believe nVidia cards suffer less in this area, but nonetheless the performance hit is > 10% even on these cards. I have not tried 3D on three displays, but I can only imagine that things slow to a crawl because you are now involving a display adaptor in a different slot, and a slower PCI one at that. Perhaps someone with a higher spec 3rd display adaptor can chime in here, but I'm pretty confident that this will be the case even with the fastest one you can put in there.Also, the reason many of us run multi monitor is to spread our FS workspace out, which generally involves undocking 2D panels or displaying 3rd party programs on the other displays. Generally you will only run one display with a 3D view and maybe a second if the perf hit is not too high, but it is highly unlikely that you will want to (nor be able to from a reasonable peformance standpoint, even with a better spec PCI card) run 3D displays on ALL three monitors at the same time. As such, you may as well dedicate one of the displays to 2D only and that may as well be the one that is likely to give you the worst 3D performance anyway.If you do decide to go the high spec PCI card, please report back on FS performance with three 3D windows on three different displays (say that quickly!), because I certainly would be interested.Gary

Hello again Gary. I totally agree with you and have used the second monitor to show third party software, GPS, ATC typed replies, etc. What I'm now trying to achieve with my current questions is a (much cheaper) solution to that offered by the "BUGEYE" system. You may be familiar with it? If not....it is a 3 screen LCD display in one long rectangular adjustable box using a MATROX Parhelia card. In addition, the front of the box contains a curved FRESNEL glass screen which essentially enlarges the viewed "surround" image for the(properly positioned viewer) to appear as an approximately 50" or > monitor. One flys in the virtual cockpit mode with extended views of scenery on both sides. I saw this at the AVSIM convention in Denver and it felt very "immersive". Unfortunately, the cost for this is prohibitively expensive (~$3000). So being resourceful, I tried two planes (with vastly different appearing cockpit instrumentation and internal appearance ...the PMDG B1900C and Eaglesoft Citation X)in virtual cockpit mode on my 21" monitor. I then undocked and dragged the same image to my 17" screen (positioned on the left), scrolled the image so that I would see the scenery out the pilots left window. I carefully adjusted the lineup and size of that image so that it closely approximated where the left edge of the straight ahead scenery(and control panel)view in the 21" monitor left off. I then fired up the engines, taxied around and took off. The results were really GOOD. I didn't see any noticable frame rate dropoff, and the surround effects (at least to the left) were almost as enjoyable as those I remembered seeing in the Bugeye setup, albeit not magnified.Since I had no real drop in performance running the two screens this way, I was hoping that by adding a second card, dedicated to a third monitor, would allow me to position that screen for a right side cockpit (and outside scenery view), again with (hopefully) a small drop in FPS performance. The cost of a higher end PCI card -plus- finding another 17" CRT monitor would probably be no more than $150.I've checked with the retailers, such as BestBuy, CompUSA, etc. and both have policies that would allow me to try the video card. If it didn't function like I hoped it would in conjunction with the primary graphics card (running a game like FS9) then I could return it for full refund (as long as I kept the box, etc.) I don't really have anything to lose, unless of course, doing this damaged my existing system (and/or the new card) due to overheating or some other issue such as inadequate power supply, etc. (Mine has a 350w supply).What do you think? Should I do it?R/MIKE

Have you looked at this idea?http://maxivista.com/I am using my laptop from work as my third minitor.I pay like 4FPS for this setup.Manny

Hi Manny,Thanks for your input. I checked out the Maxivista site (interesting) Can you possibly provide more details (specifications)as to the system you have that is running the 2 monitors and then how you proceeded to install and use this software (and laptop) in your home network? What have been the pros and cons in doing so besides the minimun loss of 4FPS (which is good)? What type of images are you displaying in each monitor while running FS9?I copied this (see next paragraph)from the Maxivista manual...does that mean you can't run a 3D moving image (like scenery outside of the cockpit)on the extra monitor?General limitationsHardware graphics acceleration such as DirectX or OpenGL is not supported for the Secondary Display R/Mike

Mike.I have a DELL XPS with 3.00G with 1 Gig ram. I run FS9 with every addon there is and that does effect my FPS..and so I am stingy about giving up any more FPS.I have two monitors. 1st 24" Dell widescreen for external view. 2nd Monitor is a 19" ELO Touchscreen. I use the Laptop as the third monitor.The 2nd and 3rd monitor I use for guages. Primarily for running the Eaglesoft'sCirrus. I move the PFD to the laptop screen and the MFD to the elo Touchscreen. Since the 19" is big I also move the reality XP GNS530 next to the MFD.I do have another Dell that I use (sometimes) for left front view running Wideview. That only has a 19"CRT hence I use it occasionaly.You can download a demo version of the MAxvista and try it for yourself.There is a bigger hit on FPS with the demo version and I was initially putt off by it. But later on when I got the actual full version (It doesn't cost much), I am happy with the 5 FPS loss. I heard a few other folks who say they don't have any loss. Maybe a loss from 55 FPS to 50 FPS is not a loss. But my 18 FPS to 13 FPS, I notice it. ;)As far as graphics... I don't see any loss of any kind. I have not tried external view. The best is..download it and try it out.Network? hmm... I don't remember doing anything special. Other than... My laptop was part of the regular wireless Network that I already had. You should be able to ping your main computer. Again.. download that freeware and look into that document.Let me know if you run into any issue in this thread.Manny

Thanks again Manny. I'll keep you informed as this progresses.MikeBTW....you must love that 24" Dell monitor? Is the 30 incher they are now selling in your future?

Given that you can return the hardware, it can't hurt to try. I'd give the Maxvista demo version idea a go first if I were you.Gary

>Thanks again Manny. I'll keep you informed as this>progresses.>>Mike>>BTW....you must love that 24" Dell monitor? Is the 30 incher>they are now selling in your future?Hee hee... :)Yeah..I liked the 24"... until I saw the 30".I have been looking at it.. but for 2grand, its a no go. I'll wait for the price to come down to $500 or so. ;)

hey there, i've been running 3 monitors all with 3d external views for a while now, it just takes a bit of tweeking to get everything right. I've tried going back to one screen and controls etc. on the others but it's just not as immersive.I'd suggest to get a new motherboard with 2 pci-e slots and a relatively decent 2nd card. you can get some pretty cheap these days. If you want 3d views from each screen I wouldn't muck around trying to get a plain old PCI slot to work.I run a dell 24" plus a 17" samsung off a 7800gtx and and the other 17" samsung from my old 6600.I'm getting about 15 - 23 fps on the ground and 25 - 30 in the air with the PMDG 737 ... the 747 is a fair bit slower and really only good on one screen.a good idea to save you from having to line up the displays every time is to get active camera from http://www.anticyclone.bethen you can assign keys for as many views as you want. As soon as you boot up fs, you just hit one key for your left view, one for the middle view and one for the right view. Only takes a few seconds.Don't forget you can still have different controls pop up on the left monitor and the right monitor. when you're running your system to the max like this it's more important than ever to disable anything else running in the background.another weird thing ive discovered is it seems to make absolutely no difference to my fps if i run my main monitor at 1920x1200 and the other 2 at 1280x1024 or whether i run them all at much lower resolutions... i dont get this. doesnt make sense ! but its true.hope this helps. oh yeah the new nvidia 8x.xx drivers suck with 3 monitors, you get blue screens when you try to exit out of full screen mode, so im stuck with the 7x.xx which are quite a bit slower.D.A.M.N. you nvidia ! by now. ( I had to put dots in that 'swear' word cause the site replaced it with xxxx's ... such a bad bad word)

Hi.I tried most of the combinations available to date, including Projectors. There is a limitation, assuming you are thinking 3D/VC mode, that cannot be overcome, or at least I do not know of a way to do it, and that is the ability to separate the VC Panel from the outside scenery. It is my hope that MS rectifies that in FSX and will be able to take advantage of the multiple displays / Projectors.I know that this may not help you, but it may help others that are thinking along those lines.If anyone knows a way around this problem, please post the solution. TV

Hi people, I'm also considering getting a PCI card for a 3rd monitor. I have some questions:Q1) I already have an NVIDIA PCIe card, does this mean that I have to add another NVIDIA PCI card?Q2) If my PCI card does not have to be NVIDIA are there any performance advantages to the PCI card also being NVIDIA?Q3) Is it a wiser choice to have both of your graphics cards from the same manufacturer?Q4) I was under the impression that the more graphics memory the better. Does this also apply when you add a second PCI card or can you create a bottleneck in your system?