Looking for advice on upgrading for 4 monitors

[liebestod]

Hey everyone -

I bought one of chaud's recommended builds a little over a year ago, which meant I got a 1gb GTX 560 Ti as my video card. This has worked nicely for me, but I'd like to upgrade beyond having two monitors for the sake of having a better home office setup with a nice extended desktop. However, although my research indicates that the 560 can support up to 5 monitors at once, the card only has two DVI outs, which leaves me with a few options:

a) I originally thought it would be simple to get a DVI splitter or something to run to the additional monitors, but apparently DVI splitters will only mirror a single output stream to a single monitor and not actually create additional desktop space. There were references to some sort of DVI switches but these seemed rather expensive and I'm not sure if they'd actually do what I want.

b) I could stick in my previous PC's graphics card, which has 2 DVI slots... it's a 256mb Radeon 3850, and my obvious concern is that it might create issues working alongside the GTX. Should I be worried about this? If so, is there any way these could be minimized?

b) I could get a second 560 card. This would cost about $250 or so from what I can tell. Which is a lot. I might also have to upgrade my PSU?

d) I could get another entirely new card and (presumably) pull the current 560 out? Seems like I'd have to spring for a higher-end card, though, and I'd really like to avoid a large expenditure though.

e) Other?

I'm kinda-reluctant to buy a new card right now because I don't feel like I need to upgrade yet and I'd prefer to wait until I feel like the current computer's parts aren't keeping up with newer games... but this could be a while, I think. I'm not sure if I want to spend a lot just to have a couple extra monitors.

Any advice on this? Maybe there's some simple solution I'm missing. Hopefully.

Much appreciated regardless.

[chaud]

There are one or two 560 Tis that will support 5 monitors, while all of the rest support only two. I wouldn't recommend SLI.

What about selling your old card and getting a new one? There are several major hardware forums where you could sell it for ~$170.

[liebestod]

Thanks for the quick reply. I hadn't really considered selling the current 560 as part of an upgrade, but $170 seems like a pretty good price to go towards a new card. Are there any recommendations for a card for 4+ monitors that's still at least as good for gaming?

I did try putting in my old Radeon card for the hell of it and it actually seems to work surprisingly well (thus far.) I might run into issues when gaming but we'll see... at worst I guess I could swap it out at times. But I'll definitely keep in mind an upgrade as a backup.

[chaud]

I'm not sure how much you want to spend, but the 7850, 7950, and GTX 670 are all nice upgrades. If you want to do four monitors with AMD, you need an adapter for any monitor after the first two. They run about $25 each.