Dual monitors, 1 monitor for gaming other one for casual stuff.

[Chuadda]

The title says it all, I want to game on one monitor and the other monitor for casual stuff like, checking emails stuff etc. So how do I do this? System specs :
Gigabyte GTX 950
16 GB HyperX Ram
AMD A8 7650K
CORSAIR CX600 PSU

 

[Dugimodo]

Plug them both in set windows to extend the desktop onto the 2nd one and away you go. It's pretty simple. Just make sure the gaming screen is set as the primary monitor in the display settings. Also if you plan on swtiching back and forth setting fullscreen windowed mode in your games makes this a lot easier.

Another option is to use the onboard graphics to drive the second screen so there's no impact to gaming performance. You may need to enable it in the BIOS to make this work.

Bear in mind not all games play nice with other software, I have one that crashes any videos I'm playing when it launches and another that sometimes crashes if I alt tab out of it. I tend to watch netflix or youtube a lot while gaming and sometimes play local video files. Normally it works ok.

 

[InvalidError]

Another option is to use the onboard graphics to drive the second screen so there's no impact to gaming performance.

The only "performance" the GPU might lose from driving an extra display is the ~800MB/s of memory bandwidth necessary to refresh the extra display, which is insignificant next to the 80+GB/s most GPUs have. Using the IGP on the other hand would snub that 800MB/s from the more limited 25.6GB/s system DRAM bandwidth and CPU software is more likely to get adversely affected by the memory latency bursts when CPU memory accesses conflict with IGP's. You also may have reduced CPU performance due to the IGP raising CPU package power by a few watts, reducing thermal headroom.

There will be a slight performance impact either way and I suspect using the IGP will be worse in CPU-intensive games.

 

[Dugimodo]

It all depends, I have an i7 6700K, a GTX 980, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. I run dual screens off the 980 and it's perfectly fine in terms of gaming even when playing videos on the other screen. It tends to be better using the onboard though, the 2nd screen video playback can get glitchy when running of the same card I'm gaming on. You're probably right regards game performance though, it's more the other tasks that run better when doing both.

My CPU never get's stressed enough to worry about and I don't notice the loss of system RAM either so for me those are not concerns.