How to Set up Multiple Monitors

The connectors on each monitor obviously need to correspond to ports on your source device, in this case your PC. If you’re on a notebook or laptop you’ll likely be limited to HDMI and maybe USB-C. As you may guess, portable PCs don’t make for very good multiple monitor hosts. They lack the ports and processing power. You really should be on a rather beefy desktop to consider multiple monitors. We advise getting at least a mid-range discrete graphics card. Even if your desktop’s motherboard has integrated graphics, the choice of ports may be limited or the iGPU (integrated graphics processing unit) won’t have the muscle to handle an expanded graphics load.

Modern graphics cards like the AMD 5700XT and NVIDIA RTX 2070 have three DisplayPort connectors and one HDMI as a minimum. That’s more than enough for a dual or triple screen setup. Whether or not one graphics card will be enough to power your applications depends on what you want to do. In any case the GPU needs to cope with more pixels, which can be extremely demanding if you want to run the latest games in ultra settings. The strain on a graphics card will be lower if you just want a bigger desktop for multitasking Word, Chrome, and Netflix, for example. That scenario should be fine.

For gaming on multiple displays you may want to consider dual graphics cards, as the “golden rule” generally does state one GPU per screen – that’s the guiding principle for game streaming services like Stadia and PS Now. Of course, using NVIDIA SLI or AMD CrossFire to link two graphics cards in one desktop PC comes with extra hardware costs and more setup. It may be advisable if you’re big on gaming, though.

You could combine your discrete graphics cards and any onboard graphics hardware by going into the BIOS and looking for graphics settings. You’ll find an integrated GPU or onboard GPU toggle with the option to “always enable”. Choose that, as by default integrated GPUs switch off once you install a discrete GPU. Having integrated and discrete graphics working at the same time theoretically gives you more ports and additional computing power. Sadly, that could come at the cost of software conflicts so we recommend using only discrete GPUs if possible.