t wrote:

Thanks Paul,

I appreciate all your detailed advice. I will try using two video cards
and hope it resolves the issue.

Are there any good graphic cards which would not have this VPU recover
and would fit in the 790 mini tower? Perhaps, next time I should get
those for such uses.

From a technical perspective, I would personally
prefer to handle it with a single card. That is, as long
as the monitor orientation is panorama 1x3. I understand you
can use one of the other monitor outputs as a "random"
non-Eyefinity monitor, so if you wanted to arrange the
three monitors in the letter "L", you could.

Your idea of using two monitors is fine, except for two things.

1) Greater potential for one monitor to update 30ms after the other.

2) Possibility OS will randomly swap the purpose of the two video cards,
such that the left monitor becomes the right monitor and vice versa.
I wouldn't mention this, except it happened to me. I don't really
know how prevalent Display Control Panel issues are with multiple
video cards.

If you had a 5450, then I'd probably buy a second.

If the 5450 was doing VPU reset, I'd buy a couple
cheap NVidia cards to replace it. Sometimes you can
get cards for $30 to $50. Back-to-School is coming soon,
so expect prices to be headed in the wrong direction.

A few things for computers are under supply pressure. We're
short of Flash. We're short of DRAM. On video cards, the
high end cards are being used to mine Ethereum. But that should
leave the $30 cards for your experiment.

(A 710 with a fan on it. $38)

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16814125900

That one has DVI-D not DVI-I. There are no VGA signals on the
DVI connector. You could use a "DVI to HDMI out" adapter on the
bottom connector, for 1920x1080. Otherwise, the card may simply
not have the resolution options needed for your project.

Getting max connector flexibility could cost $200. For that price,
you could likely drive quite a variety of monitors. But that
card probably wouldn't be that good a choice for a machine with
a teeny tiny PSU.

As long as you check the specs, you've made sure you have
the right connectors for the three monitors (or an adapter
or two to cover off that requirement), I'm sure you can
whip something together. My main concern then would be
with the (1) behavior. Even when you use two heads on the
same video card, they could end up out of phase. Whereas
with Eyefinity 1x3 panorama mode, they'd be aligned in
time (since they're actually coming off a single head
just before the crossbar).

This doc has a picture of the crossbar. See page 8.
It takes a few seconds for the picture on page 8 to
render so be patient.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061126...Whitepaper.pdf

For Eyefinity, you'd be using the top block on the left,
and then using three connectors on the right (off the crossbar).
A single head generates 5760x1080, and the crossbar does
"Matrox triple head" style chopping, to make three 1920x1080
outputs. That's how Eyefinity would differ from the generation
in that document.

Paul