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3 monitor budget hyperpin cab question


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hi all

so I recently decided to try and build a cabinet for my games room. I was originally gonna use a 2 monitor setup, however I have a few old TV's laying around so I thought I might as well use them. the tvs I have are a 40" a 19 - 21" and a smaller 14" or 15". So my question is this, to keep costs down can I connect the playfield and backglass to a decent graphics card (which is what I was originally going to do) and then connect the dmd to the original video card in the pc? Although I'm pretty good as a user with computers I'm not very technical so the more simple the answer the better lol.

Thanks.

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it depends, some onboard graphics will automatically turn off when they detect pcie graphic card, some can work in parallel - it's best to check you bios for options

And on some you can get both working at the same time, but you have to explicitly enable it by editing the BIOS settings. (How you do that depends on the machine - you usually have to press a certain the F-key, usually F8, F2, or F12, at just the right moment during the POST - shortly after you turn on the machine, before Windows starts booting.) My Gigabyte motherboard works this way - by default, it'll disable the on-board graphics if there's a separate graphics card installed, but you can override that setting.

One caveat: on my machine, there's a noticeable performance penalty to putting one of the monitors on the on-board graphics card. It runs faster to put all three monitors on the add-in graphics card instead. If you haven't bought a video card yet, you might want to look for something that supports three monitors simultaneously. I don't think that will add much to the cost, since that's a pretty routine feature in the mid-range cards these days.

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if the bios doesn't support both onboard and external cards at the same time, you could pickup a usb to via/dvi adaptor.

you can pick these up from amazon for £25-30, and will work fin for running the dmd screen

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  • 2 weeks later...
if the bios doesn't support both onboard and external cards at the same time, you could pickup a usb to via/dvi adaptor.

you can pick these up from amazon for £25-30, and will work fin for running the dmd screen

I am going to use this in my build, which should start next week when all of my parts arrive. I have my old machine with a GTX 460 which I plan to use for the playfield and backglass monitor. I assumed the for the DMD (mine will be a 17" LCD) this USB-to-VGA should be fine. I actually have a couple of them so if anyone needs, let me know. Not sure how much shipping would be to the UK though.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I didn't have very much luck with a USB-hdmi converter. I ended up buying another graphics card.

I am prepared to grab another card if necessary. But I have a bunch of those converters (It is for VGA, not HDMI. I too have had trouble with those) so I want to give it a try.

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