Triple display extended desktop

[Bahumat]

I would like to have three monitors running on my friends PC using extended desktop as opposed to a cloned display.

I believe the PC has hdmi, dvi and VGA, but get the feeling all 3 won't work together?

Does anyone know the best way to achieve this? I assume a graphics card will need to be used?

Thanks!

 

[soze]

Some computers clone the Digital outputs so you can have 1 off the VGA and one off the DVI but if you connect the HDMI it might just mirror the DVI. I have 3 screens at work 2 off a Graphics card and one off the built in VGA.

I do not know if this is a hard and fast rule but I tried an nVidia card first which killed my built in card dead. And ATI card left my onbard ATI card working fine. I don't think you can have both active?

 

[Bahumat]

Ah my friend had another pc with two graphics cards so we were able to hookup 4 monitors via 2x vga and 2x hdmi (the monitors are actually TV's and did not have DVI). All's working well so we are going to get a graphics card for the other PC

 

[Raven]

I think with the ATI cards you can chose what comes out of where, I use two at home as an extended desktop so I can game and watch TV and shit at the same time. One on HDMI and one on DVI. There are 4 ports on the card (ATI R9 290) 2x HDMI and 2x DVI. I imagine the NVidia cards do something similar.

http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/eyefinity#

 

[Rubber Bullets]

I have done this in the past with an ATI card. It has DVI, VGA and Displayport outputs and using a displayport to VGA or DVI converter was able to hook up 3 monitors with no issue.

 

[Gwadien]

If you run 3 or more monitors, don't you have to buy a converter thing that are like £100 theirselves?

 

[Rubber Bullets]

Well I didn't for 3, no idea about more though. I just got a DisplayPort to VGA converter type thing. It just worked, at least until the graphics card stopped doing it, and I haven't got round to replacing it yet.

RB

 

[Lethul]

At our work all laptops with AMD grapics card can handle 3 monitors, NVIDIA only 2