Video cards and multiple monitors

[Andyk5]

Ok Video card guru's lets see how many of these questions you guys can answer.

Here is the background:

I have a 6970 that is powering 3 monitors however i am not sure how the computing power gets effected by multiple monitor setups. I am trying to understand how this works so I can decide if I want to upgrade to a single 7970/680 or add a second 6970 in CF when I upgrade to 3 27inch 1440p korean monitors.

These are the questions:

1) When I have 3 monitors plugged in to one video card, do they consume computing power if they are turned off?

2) If I have a crossfire setup and have all 3 monitors plug in to one card instead of using the DVI outputs on the other card, am I still getting the benefit? What I am trying to say is, when 2 cards are crossfired, do they always act as one or only when a driver or a profile forces them to do so.

3)If I have 2 6970's and one of them powers 2 side monitors while the other one powers the center one and I game on the center monitor, is the video card that is connected to the center monitor responsible for the game's frame rates? Is there any load sharing between two cards while a crossfire profile is not active?

4) Bonus question, if I have 3 monitors and a single 6970, can I take some load off the shoulders of the video card, by plugging in one of the 21inch Dell's that is never used for gaming in to my I72600k's on board video card?

5) Hypothetical scenario, lets say I have 2 video cards not crossfired. One is crappy they other real good, powering 2 identical monitors individually. I start the game on the monitor that is connected to the powerful video card and get great frame rates. What happens if I drag and drop the window on the other monitor that is connected to the crappy video card? Does the computer switch the computing load to the crappy video card since I have moved the game window to that monitor and I get horrible quality/frame rates?

 

[Andyk5]

Well here are some thoughts after I ran some tests.
If I use 2 side monitors on the CPU integrated videocard and use the 6970 on the main 1080p monitor,

As I move a browser window which is showing 1080p video from one monitor to another the load on the video card actually changes with respect to which card the monitor is connected on, freeing up %14 or so more resources on the video card.

The above statement sounds great but in my situation it actually made things worse. When I try to stream and upload my own games live using xsplit ( dxtory, screen capture or game capture i tried all 3 of them) while playing starcraft 2 and monitoring my own channel @1080p thru a firefox browser, my frame rates dropped incredibly. I think the reason for that is encoding requires cpu power and starcraft 2 is not a very GPU intensive game on itself, so when the 1080p broswer window encoding job was given to the CPU graphics card, it took away from the computing power of the cpu itself, my cpu monitor jumped to %98 and framerates dropped to around 20. this only happens when the CPU tried to use almost all of its cores for encoding and doing some work with the GPU at the same time.

Overall with one 6970 runnig all 3 monitors and xsplit splitting the encoding work between the CPU and GPU, I get over 120 fps consistently while streaming my game to twitch.tv at 1080p.

So questions 1,4 and 5 are redundant. I would like opinions on 2 and 3 since I do not have crossfire setup.

Also just listed my 6970 for sale on craigslist for $250, I think gonna order the 7970 (580 does not support 3 monitors) as soon as I get some answers on the crossfire questions.