Hooking up two monitors and a TV

[toadson]

Hey everyone, I have a question on how to hook up two monitors and a tv to my computer. I have an HP a6200n with an ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics card. The card has one S-Video output and two DVI outputs. I used to use one DVI port for my 22" monitor, and I have an S-Video cable adapter that plugs into the S-Video slot on the graphics card and an audio jack and splits into three RCA cables that I hookup to my Tivo box, which is obviously hooked up to my TV. The TV is an old CRT, so it only has coax and RCA inputs. I did this so I could watch movies on the PC or streaming video, and put the movie through my Tivo box so I can record/rewind and etc. The problem with running the video through the Tivo box is that it has about a second or more of lag time. This makes it awkward when positioning objects since your mouse is delayed by a full second.

I recently bought another small monitor (15"), and wanted to set it up to display the same picture as the TV. This way I could use the 15" as a second monitor, and it would make positioning movies/streams on the TV a lot quicker and easier since there wouldn't be any lag on the monitor. I thought about running the second output on my Tivo box to the monitor, but it would still be laggy which would do me no good.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could hook this up? It makes it a bit tricky since the TV needs to use an S-Video adapter. I thought about buying another video card, as I have a PCI slot still open, but since my current card is using a PCI-E x16 slot, I wouldn't be able to have two identical graphics cards. I also don't know if I could have the 15" monitor and TV as clones with two separate video cards either. Any help would be appreciated!

 

[toadson]

Shameless bump

Nobody has any ideas?

 

[runegate]

sorry, cant help..I never try to hook up more monitors one time

 

[Paperdoc]

Most of the graphics cards like you use appear to be able to produce only two simultaneous signals. For example, I expect you have your card configured to output one digital stream on one DVI connector for your monitor, plus an analog video signal out of the S-Video port. If you dig into your video card's manual I suspect it will say you cannot have more than that without giving up one of those signals.

On the other hand, what you really want is to be able to see the SAME signal twice. In other words you don't need the video card to create a third signal; you need to be able to split one of the existing two signals and feed both of those into different display units. So look for a way to split your DVI signal between two monitors, OR a way to split the analog video signal before the input into your TIVO unit. You could take the split-off analog signal (it has no delay because it come BEFORE the TIVO) and put it on a plain TV with Composite Video input. The splitter on the analog video signal is closer to what you want, because it is specifically the TV picture you want to see twice.