I have two 22″ monitors hooked up to my computer through DVI. But the other day I wanted to try out if it would work with three monitors too. However, my ATI/AMD PowerColor 4870 graphic card has only two DVI video outputs, so I borrowed my brother’s video card, which is an ATI 3650. After plugging it in to a PCI-E bus, I realised that it hasn’t even a Crossfire connector. I did some searching and found out that a Crossfire bridge is only needed when you want to take advantage of the extra video card in games and such, which I wasn’t interested of. Then I hooked up my brother’s 17″ monitor to the 3650 card. The monitor had only a VGA input tho, while the card only had DVI outputs, so I had to use a DVI-to-VGA adapter.
I started with booting up Windows 7, and it worked fine with 3 monitors. However, I didn’t test it for too long. Then I rebooted the computer and started up Ubuntu 10.10 instead, to see if it would work. I had to do some configurations in the ATI Catalyst Control Center, but then it worked there too. However, it worked a bit strangely, almost like its own desktop. The 17″ monitor had the standard panel configuration for a single monitor, and I wasn’t able to drag windows between it and the other two monitors. I didn’t have much time tho, and my brother wanted his card and monitor back, so I never solved that odd problem. Maybe I had to adjust something in CCC, or somewhere else, I don’t know.
To summarize this post: You can use three monitors by plugging in a second (AMD/ATI) graphic card. The card must not be of the same model, or even of the same generation (ATI 4870 and ATI 3650). You don’t need a crossfire bridge. Though, I can’t say if this applies on Nvidia cards too.
Last week I got an USB memory from my school, to use at the web design classes, and now after putting a lot of stuff on it I realised that the allocation unit size was way to high. The content took up 930 MB, and on my internal hard disk it had the size of 964 MB (because of the allocation unit size). So that wasn’t a huge loss. But on my USB memory it took up 1,28 GB! And that’s because of the default allocation unit size of the memory stick that was 32 kB!
