How many displays?

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OldMX

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A friend of mine has this card, got it for almost free and already has 2 displays connected and working happy, but he asks me if he can add a third display using some "hdmi to vga" adapter? Never seen a triple display setup before, but i'm clueless about.

Thanks in advance.
 
Nope 2 displays max. All consumer level nVidia and ATI cards have only 2 RAMDACs on them and each VGA/DVI/HDMI connection uses 1 of those. So even if it has 3 ports on it only 2 can be active at once.

The exception is the 5000 series Radeon cards, which still only have 2 RAMDACs, but also have a DisplayPort connection. DisplayPort doesn't require a RAMDAC and so you can put as many of them on the card as you can fit on the back panel. You just need a DP monitor or active DP adapter in that case.
 
Thanks a lot for the answer, can you suggest any card for that he needs? I'm kinda lost on the newer Radeons, only thing i know is he needs a Triple display out, and to be low profile.

Thanks again.
 
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He can just add another GT210 video card. Each video card supports only 2 outputs, but you can add more than one video card. You may need a PCI video card if the motherboard only has one PCI-E slot. This is not for gaming though, desktop work.

If he wants to use a single video card for all 3 monitors, the HD5770(~$150) + DP-to-VGA adapter (~$30) is a good start. And this will allow gaming across all 3 monitors.

Is your friend gaming at all? If not, just use 2 video cards.
 
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No no gaming at all, the bad part is no GT210 for PCI (not pci-express). Can a cheap radeon do the trick?
 
OldMX said:
No no gaming at all, the bad part is no GT210 for PCI (not pci-express). Can a cheap radeon do the trick?
Click to expand...

A 8400GS PCI video card will work well.

The video cards do not have to match, but I'd pick an Nvidia card so you only need to install one video card driver for both video cards.
 
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