Hooked on Triple Monitors by Tim Daniell

Was content with a one monitor setup for years. Lately have been using a 4850 with 24" 1920x1200 dell. After reading so many reviews on a 3 monitor setup, had to try it.

I did not want to spend much and got lucky... did not spend a dime even though my motherboard had only one PCIE x16 slot and and the rest x1's. This was solved by cutting a slot down (Dremel) the back end of one of the PCIE x1 risers so a normal PCIE x16 card would fit in at a reduced x1 speed. The big question was whether the x1 slot would provide enough bandwidth. I knew a x16 card would fit in there okay, but would only be connected to one of the 16 lanes. The card being used was an old free x1300 Radeon, but would provide a good connection to the last monitor to see if the x1 PCIE would work.

Got two old 17" lcd monitors nobody was using and stood them 90 degrees in portrait mode on either side of the 24".

Connected everything, set the 17" monitors to 480x640 and could not get SoftTH to work in Windows 7 64 only due to the X1300 Radeon not being supported by the ATI Win 7 drivers (they support the newer ones fine, just the older gen's are not atm).

Switched over the project to Win XP 32 and backed up the newer ATI drivers to 9.3 which were the last ones to support the X1300. Everything came up fine and SoftTH worked really smooth. It stays locked in at 59hz never dipping and very smooth like Vsync. Vsync is not selected on either ATI driver or iRacing options so there is not the lag normally seen on this system with Vsync.

The overall resolution is sent out as a 3760x1200 on a 1920x1200x32 center monitor and two 480x640x16 side monitors. The 4850 does not break a sweat without shadows.

After hours of fiddling with it, this is my settings. I like the way it feels, very smooth and much more immersive.

; SoftTH 1.09 configuration file
; by Kegetys, http://www.kegetys.net
;

[config]
deviceIDLeft=1
deviceIDright=2
secondaryWidth=480
secondaryHeight=640
secondaryRefresh=60
secondaryFormat=RGB16D
uploadMethod=blit
forceAffinity=0
borderSize=100
sideExtraWidth=-1100
noHotkeys=0
noOSD=0

[Direct3D]
lensCorrection=0
lensCorrectionEdge=0
hideNondefaultDevices=0
forceHorizontalFOV=0
forceResolutionWidth=0
forceResolutionHeight=0
force16bitDepth=0
sleepBeforeRead=4
useMultihead=0
delayedPresent=0
autoSquash=0
altResetBehaviour=0
d3d8dll=auto

[hooks]
doHooking=1
doScaleMouseCoordinates=0
doScaleFromLeftScreen=0
doScaleWindowRects=0
doScaleClientRects=1
mouseXoffset=auto

[modes]
1920x1200x59
auto

Last modified on 2009/9/16 by Eric_P