Triple Monitor setup

[ninja_unmatched]

Hello,
I have a Dell Studio 9000 desktop PC. Which has only one PCI-e x16 slot. To get 3 screen I have 2 screens connected to the ATI Radeon HD7770 using HDMI and DVI (1920x1080 and a 1280x1024 screen respectively) while a 3rd 1920x1080 screen (HDMI) is connected to an ATI Radeon HD 5000 series card. How I did this since the 9000 only has one x16 slot is I got one of those adapter cards that converts x1 to x16. It works okay this way. BUT.....

When I play videos on the 3rd 1920x1080 screen the video is not as smooth playing. I thought to just get the Display port and connect all 3 screens to the 7770 card but I figured that would degrade gaming performance more than what I want. Any suggestions in getting the 3rd 1920x1080 screen to play video smooth.

The Dell has the Core i7 920 2.67GHZ with 6 GB of memory. I even saw windows switch to Aero Basic one time so far since I set it up this way. It switched back on it own not long after but just a weird thing there I saw. I know about Windows 7 and some sort of video limit which I have seen before on this PC but it was staying on Aero basic before quite often until I changed from the HD4000 series I had in it to the 5000 series. So there is an improvement but still not perfect. Any ideas????

 

[Volcano]

The simplest answer, just connect your third monitor to your 7770. Gaming performance will not go down if you only game on one monitor anyway. You aren't able to utilize both cards in gaming anyway (because the two are not crossfire compatible), so really there is no reason you shouldn't.