Help with choosing a 2nd monitor

[Vatican]

I have a primary monitor the alienware 24.5 240hz that i game on. The screen is impressive for its purpose but for browsing and twitch/youtube/discord I'd like to keep it on the side on a seperate monitor.

I have a X-star 27inch korean monitor OC'd to 110hz for now (I've had this for years and it still looks great) however I can't help but see the large bezels and even with a monitor arm it doesn't look even next to my alienware. How do you guys combat this, It might be due to the size differences of the monitor but I can't really let go of the 24.5 240hz i have for gaming. Should i just get a new monitor that has really thin bezels? Thanks.

Also do you guys connect both monitors to your GPU (I have a gtx 1080) or do you offload the second monitor to the Motherboard input?

 

[XoR_]

Also do you guys connect both monitors to your GPU (I have a gtx 1080) or do you offload the second monitor to the Motherboard input?

Connecting second monitor to different GPU have surprisingly one advantage: some GUI draving operation will be faster because of design choice Microsoft made since WDDM 1.1 where they removed copy of window content from main system memory and with two different GPU's (especially from different manufacturers using different drivers) this content is kept. It is normally not that big of a difference but in some cases (eg. using programs to replace GDI font rendering with FreeType2 rendering) it can be quite noticeable. This was at least in Win7, I am not sure if this is still the case in Win10

Disadvantages I can think of is that on-board GPU might not work with madVR (it is the only the best renderer for supported media players) and if it works it might not have the juice to do proper upscalling or other its magic.

Other differences might be less GPU load on your main GPU when drawing windows on second monitor connected to second monitor connected to onboard GPU but I am not really that sure about that. Programs might be still drawn on primary GPU (the one that your primary monitor is connected to) and content copied to second GPU which obviously would be less efficient. In either case it probably is program specific and I would not count on less GPU load. Obviously you get more memory footprint with also using onboard GPU as its driver and tools need to be loaded and some memory allocated to GPU and also you get the keeping content of windows thing I mentioned earlier which also eats some memory. Also managing everything with one gpu control panel is more convenient.

One case that I would really consider using second GPU is when it is Radeon and calibrating display. Radeons can change gamma without banding on any monitor even with 8bit connection and you can also correct gamut to almost exactly sRGB with one click in Radeon control panel. Monitors have their gamut coverage encoded with EDID (informations monitor provide to GPU) and it is usually pretty accurate. Most monitors have quite large gamut errors by default so it is nice feature.

In any other case it probably doesn't really matter that much.

 

[DanNeely]

Mis-matched sizes are annoying. At work I'm living with left to right; a 13" laptop screen, 24" 16:10 and 22" 16:9. The first is half the size of the second, the third's about 2" shorter than the middle one. I've found that top aligning screens when possible works better than bottom alignment because I'm more likely to be dragging windows from one to next from the top.

I find even with 2 monitors (lab area in my old job) that placing them so the bezel gap is off center helps some, basically I put my main monitor almost dead center with the secondary one to the side. That way the bezels are semi-out of sight most of the time.

If the misalignment really bothers you though a more closely matching 24" 1080p60 monitor will at least be relatively cheap.

 

[XoR_]

Mis-matched sizes are annoying. At work I'm living with left to right; a 13" laptop screen, 24" 16:10 and 22" 16:9. The first is half the size of the second, the third's about 2" shorter than the middle one. I've found that top aligning screens when possible works better than bottom alignment because I'm more likely to be dragging windows from one to next from the top.

I find even with 2 monitors (lab area in my old job) that placing them so the bezel gap is off center helps some, basically I put my main monitor almost dead center with the secondary one to the side. That way the bezels are semi-out of sight most of the time.

If the misalignment really bothers you though a more closely matching 24" 1080p60 monitor will at least be relatively cheap.

27" 16:9 and 24" 16:10 works very well as the vertical size is almost the same
if however I used smaller screen for gaming it would be somewhat annoying...
I use secondary screen strictly for videos only where its picture quality shines and primary for web, text work and games. I never ever use primary for videos or secondary for games or text and if I monetarily move windows around I quickly regret it. It is best to specialize displays for tasks done on them.

At work I have two 23" 16:9 and one 20" (or is it 21"... not sure ) 4:3 on right side. Keep task bar with 3x increased height (small icons and never combine for win95 taskbar experience) and it makes its actual working area to match other monitors.