The saga continuum’s – I am not going to be beaten on this (famous last words?)

O.K. this is a continuation of the attempt to add a third monitor to my system saga.  Let’s recap how we got to the present state.  Bought an ATI Radeon 5770 card as it said it supported 3 monitors – great!  Not so great – for the 3rd monitor you need a display port adapter to link in to the 3 rd monitor (see the small print right down the bottom of the page).  O.K. fine I’ll buy one.  Not in the U.K. at the beginning of 2010 – end of 2009 you won’t.  However, looking at the web again in Feb 2010 I saw that Overclockers U.K. had some in (made by Sapphire) – brilliant – bought one.  Fitted to system and fired everything up – still the third monitor isn’t seen – why not?  Because the ATI Eyefinity software that allows you to see 3 monitors doesn’t run on Windows XP – what do I run?  Windows XP of course.

I am still not beaten 🙂  I knew of some software called Ultramon that works on Windows XP and is meant for multiple monitors.  Great!  And there’s a 30-day free trial to go with it – even better!!  Fired this up yesterday and – still only see 2 monitors 🙁  Clearly some way back in the software chain there is still a Windows XP/ATI Eyefinity problem lurking and Ultramon doesn’t short-circuit the problem for me as I hoped (against hope) that it would.  Or perhaps it’s simply a Windows XP problem as it only shows 2 displays in the “Display Settings” menu, whereas ATI Catalyst Centre does actually show 3 monitors, even if one of them is always “greyed out”.  Damn – I really thought I had it beat that time.

O.K. so I’m going for the ultimate fall-back position – I’ve just ordered a new motherboard from Novatech that has two PCI Express graphics slots so I can run two cards simultaneously, and therefore (theoretically) run up to 4 monitors.  I’ll keep you informed as to what happens in the next battle to add one lousy monitor to my system.

I am going to win this one – or empty my Bank account trying!

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