Triple Monitor Setup

I have covered in the past the idea of setting up two monitors on a single PC. Many people now do it, and many video cards are now available which offer dual output from a single card. But, what if you wanted to add yet another monitor? How about 3? I recently did this. I spend most of my workday in front of the computer and the multiple screens increase my productivity quite a bit, especially when I’m doing development. Windows XP can support more than one video card, and I happened to have a few sitting around. I already had an ATI Radeon dualhead card installed in the AGP slot, and obviously I had no additional AGP slots to work with. So, I found an older PCI card (an old Diamond Multimedia card using the Rive128 chipset) and installed it into a spare PCI slot.

On the first boot, the machine would not boot. This had to do with a BIOS setting which told the motherboard whether to initiate the AGP video or the PCI video first. It was set to PCI, and it just would not boot. So, I removed the card and used the AGP one to go into the BIOS and set that setting to AGP. I then put the card back in and the machine did boot. The screen connected to the PCI card did not show anything during boot-up. But, once Windows started, it detected the second video card and installed the drivers. I then went into the control panel > Display > setting and chose monitor number 3. I checked off “Extend my Windows Desktop onto this monitor”, applied changes, and then the third monitor came to life. Adjust the settings and then you’re good to go.

Obviously, the second video card is old, but unless you do pretty intense graphical things, most older video cards will work just fine. and if you can fork over the money for another monitor, this is a great way to use an old video card. And, if you think two monitors is nice, you should try using three.