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System Upgrade/Mutli Monitor Setup HELP! ^_^
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Alice Saki
Nocturnal Romance
Cynosural Field Theory.
#1 - 2012-08-27 14:15:01 UTC
I want to set up a 3 monitor System, I did build this myself but I am basically clueless when it comes to components...

So this is what I have I'm hoping someone could recommend items to buy and I'll figure out the rest ^_^

Much thanks ^_^

Budget? hmmm £500 - £800 maybe ^_^

Processor:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.3GHz

Memory:
Corsair 4GB (4x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 XMS3 i5 Memory Kit CL9

Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB (Could someone recommend a Better card?) ( I assume I'll need to have two cards inside the case for 3 monitors)


Operating System:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Motherboard:
ASUS P8P67PRO REV3.0


Power Supply:
Corsair TX 650W V2 PSU (Enough Power?)



FREEZE! Drop the LIKES AND WALK AWAY! - Currenly rebuilding gaming machine, I will Return.
Alpheias
Tactical Farmers.
Pandemic Horde
#2 - 2012-08-27 14:25:00 UTC
Just replace the nvidia card with something from amd and you are set.

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Tiger Would
Doomheim
#3 - 2012-08-27 14:26:54 UTC  |  Edited by: Tiger Would
Alice Saki wrote:
I want to set up a 3 monitor System, I did build this myself but I am basically clueless when it comes to components...

So this is what I have I'm hoping someone could recommend items to buy and I'll figure out the rest ^_^

Much thanks ^_^

Budget? hmmm £500 - £800 maybe ^_^

Processor:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.3GHz

Memory:
Corsair 4GB (4x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 XMS3 i5 Memory Kit CL9

Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB (Could someone recommend a Better card?) ( I assume I'll need to have two cards inside the case for 3 monitors)


Operating System:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Motherboard:
ASUS P8P67PRO REV3.0


Power Supply:
Corsair TX 650W V2 PSU (Enough Power?)







For that kind of budget I would explore a different option.
Please recognize that there are no more bad CPU's or CPU's that would seriously hold you back.
(Keep price bracket in mind, there are setups that do require proper attention)

That said, I would be looking into the AMD Hexacores CPU 's and the ATI/AMD 3 monitor head graphic cards (3 monitor connectors on one card).
This is MUCH cheaper, while graphics performance stays on par up to about 3 clients running.

Running multiple clients is where you need CPU cores for rather than sheer GHz or parallel processing abilities within one cores pipelines.
The overall lower system price tag will also allow for more memory, at least 8GB which is also needed running multiple clients.


The system you are proposing will score higher in integer calc performance test programs.


The one I am suggesting to explore will run 3 clients of EvE much better and is able to stay withing budget!


Just my 2 cents


Edit: The 650 corsair will do just fine, those PSU are quite good IMO
Unless you are going to use more than 2 graphcards, you might need to up the power a bit than.


Edit 2: This setup will also allow for some budget to go into other possible bottlenecks that hurt a lot more in REAL LIFE performance......SSD HDD

Once you think you have it all, you have actually become ignorant towards everything else.

T. Would
Caleidascope
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#4 - 2012-08-27 21:58:09 UTC
Alice Saki wrote:

Memory:
Corsair 4GB (4x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 XMS3 i5 Memory Kit CL9

4x2GB tells me that you are buying 8GB kit. 4 modules that are 2GB each, total of 8GB.

I have GTX 460. It has 2 dvi ports, 1 hdmi ports. I run my two monitors from the two dvi ports. I have not tried using hmdi port for the third monitor, I might try it later in the week.

nVidia has a utility that lets you setup multiple monitors. It is bundled with the driver.

If the three monitor setup proves not to work from one card, you can add some cheap second card from nVidia. This way you use the same driver for both cards. Something from 4xx or 5xx series. The cheap cards like 430 or 520 get their power from the pci-e slot so you should not have much trouble running them.

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Eat dessert first!
Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#5 - 2012-08-27 23:51:29 UTC  |  Edited by: Akita T
Allegedly you can only use 2 of the 3 ports on NVIDIA video cards at the same time, and you need two NVIDIA cards if you want to use more than two monitors at the same time.
The only exceptions to that rule being the video cards that already have two GPUs on them already, basically having an "internal SLI mode", so to speak - the only stock ones that can do that are the GTX 295, GTX 590, or GTX 690, and they are able to display on three monitors with a single card, but those are expensive as hell (the only one you can still find for sale, the 690, costs over 1k USD).

There are other options, like this odd product, for instance:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130653
...which is a weird design putting two GTX 460 cores on a single huge board (which is basically what a 590 is, two underclocked 580s on a single board).
(BTW, they recommend a 700W PSU for that card, which is more or less what's also recommended for 2x 460s anyway.)

SLI mode causes a separate set of issues, which, frankly, I'd try to stay away from (microstutters being the chief concern, less pronounced for NVIDIA than for ATI/AMD, but still noticeable), at least as far as two-way SLI goes (three-way SLI minimizes the issues of two-way SLI, but you're talking three separate cards here... you can also disable SLI and just have each card drive a separate monitor instead, when not desiring to stretch a game screen over multiple monitors).
Putting a two NVIDIA cards of different models inside a PC DOES NOT allow the use of SLI mode, and you are forced to use each card independently to drive whatever monitors they will be driving. In fact, NVIDIA SLI is only guaranteed to work properly when you put in cards with identical specs, so preferably the exact same model of video card from the same manufacturer (as different manufacturers could have deviated from stock specs on various models).

Alternatively, all AMD video cards (and some from the times it was still ATI) support 3 monitors on a single card from the start.
You could get something like this, for instance:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127688
...for about the same price as the previously linked monstruosity, more or less similar game performance levels, but none of the 2-way SLI issues.
The downside is that you may need to also buy some adapter cables for the video outputs, but that's not such a big deal.

Akita T evewiki profile | | | Build your own EVE-ready PC
Shameless Avenger
Can Preachers of Kador
#6 - 2012-08-28 16:08:27 UTC
If you decide to go AMD, the top card ATM is the Radeon HD 7970.

It comes in different versions, some with 1 DVI connector, some with 2.

Example with one DVI

Example with 2 DVI

Either Way, most come with 2 Mini DisplayPort. Adapters to connect a DVI monitor to a Mini DisplayPort are cheap, around 15 bucks. And sometimes they come with the card.

I have a 3 monitor setup with AMD (older generarion 6850s). My cards came with 2 DVIs and I'm using one of the Mini DisplayPorts for the 3rd monitor.

I did run this machine with just one card and it was enough for running 3 eve clients (or one really big screen). I added the 2nd card in crossfire to get better frame-rate on other games that were more graphic intensive.

Using 2 DVIs and one Mini Display port on AMD cards works like a charm. I'm not sure how a 2nd Mini DisplayPort would work... there's some mumbo jumbo I haven't read about "active dongles" & "passive dongles"... but you said 3 monitors, not 4... so you should be fine.



"This is the Ninja. He will scan you down; he will salvage your wrecks and there shall be no aggro"
Lithalnas
Dirt 'n' Glitter
Local Is Primary
#7 - 2012-08-29 07:26:12 UTC
out of curiocity, what else are you going to play on this PC. EVE is a fairly lightweight client, even with 3 clients running side by side it will not even remotely strain the system. Now if you want to run BF3 at 5k x 2k then you might need multiple cards just out of a need to drive that many pixles.

I like the 460 series but i also like the 660 series which came out last week.

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Alice Saki
Nocturnal Romance
Cynosural Field Theory.
#8 - 2012-08-29 07:31:19 UTC
Erm.... DayZ and League of Legends oh and I started Guildwars 2

FREEZE! Drop the LIKES AND WALK AWAY! - Currenly rebuilding gaming machine, I will Return.
Yui Okane-Mochi
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#9 - 2012-08-30 14:07:07 UTC
Eve is quite RAM hungry. 8 GB should support maybe 4 clients.


CPU is not so important. My quad core i7 965/12GB which is a couple of generations behind the 2500 can run 8 clients without breaking too much sweat. I assume you are choosing a K range CPU because you intend to overclock it. A non K range CPU will save you a few quid if you don't plan on overclocking.


Consider buying 2nd hand cards from upgraders wif you are on a tight budget. A 6970 should work pretty well for your purposes - and you can add another later for crossfire when in Eyefinity mode.

Eyefinity with World of Tanks is MAD.


結衣
Agaetis Byrjun Endalaust
#10 - 2012-08-30 18:22:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Agaetis Byrjun Endalaust
Quote:
Allegedly you can only use 2 of the 3 ports on NVIDIA video cards at the same time, and you need two NVIDIA cards if you want to use more than two monitors at the same time.
The only exceptions to that rule being the video cards that already have two GPUs on them already, basically having an "internal SLI mode", so to speak - the only stock ones that can do that are the GTX 295, GTX 590, or GTX 690

are you serious? Actually any gtx 6xx card supports surround on 3 montiors + a 4th for 'other stuff'. And I meant _surround_ so literally you can say any nvidia gtx 6xx card supports up to 4 monitors.
The only problem you could have should be if you have 3 different monitors (= different manufacturer/model) and want to use them in surround.

OP:
CPU is ok
RAM is cheap, get 8 or even 16Gb (they cost pretty much the same of 8). I'd never recomend vengeance. Try g.skill ripjaws. Low latency is to be preferred to a step more in clock.
GPU: gtx670 one of the many (MSI or Gigabyte Windforce have great feedbacks)
MOBO: why getting an unsupported chipset for a new setup? Get a Z77 card (asus or asrock should be fine, but for sure there are tons more I've never read of)
PSU: don't get a TX, get an HX or even better an AX. Not only because of modularity, but most of all for the quality of the components. 650W is more than enough for an overclocked system and a single GPU. Should be fine also if tomorrow you'll add one more GPU in SLI, but in this case I'd go overkill with a 750 or 850 for nasty and extreme configurations.

All this is within your budget but don't be cheap on fans and cooling ;)

Monitors are excluded of course.

__________________________ just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not after you
Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#11 - 2012-08-30 19:20:30 UTC
Agaetis Byrjun Endalaust wrote:
are you serious? Actually any gtx 6xx card supports surround on 3 montiors + a 4th for 'other stuff'.

Hmm... http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision-surround-system-requirements.html
Looks like you're right. Huh, colour me surprised.
Didn't know they finally managed to (finally) pull that on a single card too... so far only on the 660 Ti, 670 and 680 though, it seems.
About damn time, I say, ATI had that since the 5xxx family, so almost two and a half years ago.

Still, a 660 Ti (the cheapest of those three) will cost the OP around 240-270 GBP, and the entire budget he was hoping to fit his entire machine into was hopefully 500 GBP (or 800 GBP at a maximum).
A 2 GB Radeon HD 7850 starts as low as 155 GBP (significantly cheaper) and only benchmarks about 25% slower (varies depending on game), so it's a much better value for the cash either way.

I guess a 660 Ti would still be an option though.

Akita T evewiki profile | | | Build your own EVE-ready PC
Surfin's PlunderBunny
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#12 - 2012-08-30 19:31:28 UTC
Alpheias wrote:
Just replace the nvidia card with something from amd and you are set.


:Trollface:

"Little ginger moron" ~David Hasselhoff 

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Agaetis Byrjun Endalaust
#13 - 2012-08-30 21:06:37 UTC  |  Edited by: Agaetis Byrjun Endalaust
Quote:
Didn't know they finally managed to (finally) pull that on a single card too... so far only on the 660 Ti, 670 and 680 though, it seems.

not that there is any other one afaik in the Kepler generation and of course you're forgetting the 690.

Quote:
About damn time, I say, ATI had that since the 5xxx family, so almost two and a half years ago.

indeed eyefinity and the multimonitor support were a good plus for ATI in the past. Nvidia still considered it a sort of "gadget" which was not really needed when the gtx 5xx was produced. Don't want to look like defending them but the percentage of the players using more than 2 monitors was close to 0.something% not so long ago.

Quote:
A 2 GB Radeon HD 7850.......

the 7850 should be compared to the gtx590 not the 670 nor the 660 Ti. Being 25% less performant is a huge gap and I believe that is without any particular effect/texture/antialising/shadow enabled, the more details you put in the equation the more the gap get closer to 50%.
The 7970 is the one to compare to the 670 and to the 660Ti as well. And the price is quite the same of the 670 in fact, maybe a bit less cause that is the way AMD/ATI works: giving out new products earlier than the counterpart at the price they want, then reduce them when Nvidia does what they always did (did I say what?)

If we talk about a pure EVE setup I'd say both the 560Ti and even the 7850 are good enough at the moment. When we'll have dx11 support and tasselation.... not anymore!

About the costs, talking in euro

CPU: i2500k 190€
RAM: 16Gb ripjaws 90€ (8Gb 50€ damn they are cheap and I was wrong here! OP get 8 Gb and save 50 bucks)
MOBO: dunno but 100-150€ max
GPU: 350€ <---- yep that's freaking expensive, but this IS 80% of your gaming PC
PSU: corsair hx 650 100€

TOT: 840€ or 665 GBP

Add 90€ for a good SSD 128Gb (you want this!) and 100-150 for chassis+fans+cooler (you can spend an undefined amount of money here if you want) and you should be in the 1000€ or 800GBT range.

Spending 50 bucks less for the 660Ti could be an option if OP plays only EVE, but I wouldn't recomend it for future happiness. Wanna go the AMD/ATI way? ok get a 7970, which is a pretty nice card, and spend just the same (oh maybe 30€ less). That is the hardest part of the decision tho, but I'm not in trolling mode so I'll stop it here :)

__________________________ just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not after you
Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#14 - 2012-08-30 22:27:58 UTC  |  Edited by: Akita T
No idea what country you live, but it looks like either your VAT is noticeably lower than in the UK, or you're getting cheaper suppliers around your parts (lucky you).
On UK-based sites, I can see the 2500k sold at about 165-170 GBP (that's 208-215 EUR), the Corsair HX650 at 85-101 GBP (107-127 EUR, but the 85 is "this weekend only special offer"), a decent 120GB SSD is around 80 GBP (100 EUR), and so on and so forth.
Also, you forgot the HDD altogether from your build. I seriously doubt a single 120 GB SSD would be enough. You want the very least a 1 TB HDD nowadays (I have a total of 4TB on my 2 year old machine and I'm struggling with free space), and that's at least another 60 GBP on top.
All in all, that should come up to around 950 GBP minimum instead of just 800 GBP as you thought, but I guess he can shave off some stuff from the case, PSU, mobo, RAM and maybe SSD size to just barely squiggle into the upper limit of his proposed budget.


That being said, why go with a 2500k when you could go with a 3570 instead at the same price (actually, about 2 GBP cheaper), or a 3570k for about 11 GBP extra ?
It's not like he'll bother significantly overclocking either of those on air cooling, and he can't really afford decent CPU water cooling in that budget, so the IvB should be pretty much on par with the SB, and at least he can get PCI-E 3.0 and higher native RAM frequency support with his MoBo/CPU combo.

Also, yeah, sure, a good GPU is pretty important for a gaming PC, but everything the OP listed as playing (EVE, DayZ, LoL, GW2) should run perfectly fine at more than decent graphic detail even on a Radeon HD 6770 (which only costs around 75 GBP).
Then in 2 years (I don't think we have a chance to see DX11 EVE before then, probably only later), he can buy a 7850 which now costs around 155 GBP for probably under 100 GBP at that time (and he could probably also maybe sell his aged 6770 for at least 30 GBP, so the upgrade will cost him only around 70-ish GBP).
The newest generation of graphic cards is almost always a pretty bad buy whenever it first comes out from a price/performance perspective. It's best to wait at least half a year before purchasing, preferably a year and a half or even two years before the card reaches decent and then optimal price/performance levels.

P.S. He started with a 460 (which should already be more than enough for what he wants to play), it's not very reasonable to expect he'd really want a 660 Ti right now instead just so he can stick to a single NVIDIA card and 3 monitors, when he's got so many much cheaper options with single ATI cards.

Akita T evewiki profile | | | Build your own EVE-ready PC
Agaetis Byrjun Endalaust
#15 - 2012-08-30 23:05:50 UTC
yeah I forgot the storage device since it was not listed by the OP, as some other stuff I consider quite important for a PC and in which I spent quite some money, such as the mouse, keyboard, headphones and speakers :p

But I sware I checked the price and I live in a normally rich-but-poor-still-too-expensive central european country. To give you one tip about which country, it's the one where VAT and taxes in general are the highest than any other place in the world. Yes, not joking, we first.

The stuff about IvyBridge for the PCI-3.0 support could be debatable (I know it has it, on paper :p), but I won't also because I own an Ivy so I should just say: get an Ivy if it's as cheap as a Sandy.
Unfortunately IvyBridge's have quite a serious problem with overheating (50°C in idle and 85°C while gaming? Yes that's an average value, it could be worse tho) and not being able to scale that much in overclock, not as a i2500k, which is probably the most performant CPU in overclocking ever. But the fact Ivy's suffer from overheating is fixable, not in an easy way unfortunately.

So, depends..... prolly what you say it's finally the best for the OP, since he/she prolly doesn't need a super powered setup for that stuff and if you choose components of the previous generation (which are generally more than enough for at least 1 more year) then you could spend way less.



__________________________ just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not after you