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Sim Racing Monitors
What makes a good sim racing monitor?
In my opinion the most important feature you want from a monitor is a small response time. I would choose a monitor with a 2ms response time or less. This will reduce the lag that you see from when the image is sent and when you see it. You will see response times or display lag being higher on HDTV's compared to a specific gaming monitor. If you find a monitor with a low response time it will almost always be guaranteed to be 1080p too, which is what you also need if you are to be playing HD games. More information on input lag.

Bezel Size
Depending upon your setup I would also look for monitors with small bezels (the monitor surround) this will increase the amount of visible screen if you go to a three monitor setup. If you know that you won't be upgrading to a triple screen setup at any point then the bezel size is not an issue.

I often read the question, "I'm going through the process of making a sim racing rig, is it better to have a triple-screen monitor system or one big TV/monitor?" The answer to this question is simple, go with the three screens every time. When I first made the decision and they arrived, I hurriedly set the monitors up and I loaded a replay and watched it whilst standing in awe. I must have said, "wow" about 100 times, you just can't imagine how much more perception you get how much more of an immersive experience it becomes. Before I had a 3 screen setup I was running my sim racing on a single 40" HDTV. I admit that I was slightly apprehensive before I made the change to 3x 24" monitors as I was worried about the lack of height of the image in comparison to the HDTV. However, now running a screen resolution of 5760x1080 over 3 screens in reality is fine. I would definately not go back to 1 screen, unless I was forced to at gun point!

Personally I run 3x Iiyama E2409HDS Full HD TFT LCD 24" DVI-D Monitors I chose them for a number of reasons. They had small bezels, which would be ideal for my eyefinity setup. Iiyama offer a 2 year onsite warranty with a 24 hour swap out, so should anything go wrong you can get it replaced the next day. The monitors also had a 2ms response time and were the only monitors I could find at the budget end of the market that didn't have a 5ms response time. I have no complaints about the monitors and would happily recommend them to other sim racers. I am very happy with my Iiyama monitors. View a list of monitors with 1ms response time.

Going to 3 Screens
When going with a 3 monitor set up there are a few routes you can go. You can use a single ATI graphics card and run eyefinity or you can run 3 NVidia cards in SLI. You just need to know what you are looking for when choosing the right video card. Other possibly cheaper alternatives are TripleHead2Go and SoftTH. SoftTH allows using three monitor "triplehead" without special hardware. You need 3 monitors attached to PCI Express video cards. TripleHead2Go is an external multi-display adapter that adds up to three monitors to your sim racing PC. It connects to the video output of your system and uses its existing GPU to provide high-quality, uncompressed graphics and video across all monitors.

Many sim racers who are new to iRacing have been suffering headaches and spending more money than necessary, due to not carrying out the proper research before going their chosen route to 3 screens.

For ATI/AMD Eyefinity and iRacing using nVidia Surround - make sure your monitors support common inputs, and avoid at all costs using VGA only monitors. They can be made to work in most cases, but the paths and additional costs needed to get there aren't trivial. This is more true of nVidia Surround which requires all monitors to be connected a specific way.

Also avoid monitors that may have only VGA and HDMI, or HDMI only inputs. Cables and adapters to get triple monitors setup for iRacing using Eyefinity and Surround using those configurations are a huge hassle and really start exploding the costs.

Running more than one monitor at iRacing using SoftTH will have a negative performance impact on systems.

iRacing in windowed mode
Run iRacing in windowed mode supports Windows XP and newer. Supports 2 and 3 monitor configurations. This requires some modification of text files. Solid solution for those wanting to use multimonitor set ups without hardware upgrades and suffering any additional performance hits from solutions like TH2GO and SoftTH. Only requires video cards which support connecting the desired number of monitors. Can be configured to run on only two monitors keeping image centered on primary monitor.

Matrox Triple Head 2 Go is a software and hardware combined solution. Supports Windows XP and newer. Supports a maximum of 3 monitors.

It only requires one video card of any generation / make. It requires the purchase of the TH2GO adapter. The adapters run from $250 (USD) and up. TH2GO limits you a maximum resolution of 5040x1050 regardless of maximum monitor resolution support. TH2GO is a better solution for those wishing to run Windows XP and / or have a configuration of monitors not supported by any other solution. Performance impact is less than the SoftTH solution, but still below the nvSurround, Eyefinity or running iRacing in windowed mode.

The cost of a Matrox TH2GO adapter is roughly the same as an nVidia or ATI card that is capable of supporting nvSurround or Eyefinity. If you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista (for Eyefinity) those are likely better options and for that reason alone we will not be giving advice on TH2GO.

It would appear that running iRacing in windowed mode can result in up to a 30% reduction in frame rate when compared to full screen mode and that frame rate is negatively impacted in environments where the GPU is the bottleneck. In environments where the CPU is the bottleneck, windowed mode has zero performance impact.

If money is not an object you may want to look into seamless display monitors that have no bezels at all! The Radius 320™ takes widescreen computing to a new level. Ergonomically shaped and beautifully designed, the widescreen display wraps around the user to provide a panoramic view of the desktop. However, I have never used or seen one of these so I can not recommend them.

Sim racing monitors 1ms response time
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