On board vs discrete

[henfai]

Hey guys sorry in advance cos I am a newbie.

So I have 2 monitors setup and currently are having both plugged into my 680. My question is, if you have 2 monitors, is it better or worse to have the secondary (school work, YouTube, blu-ray movies, videos) monitor plugged into the on-board output (hd 4000) and the main (games) to the discrete (680); or is it just better in general to have both plugged into the discrete like I have right now? Any performance gain or loss one way or the other? Thanks guys~

[Gorman]

If you don't plug anything in to the integrated, it won't do anything. So yes, it's better to plug one in to each.

But the performance loss won't be much if you are just watching movies or something. You can always test it yourself by checking your framerate in game with both configurations.

[Arne_Saknussemm]

Depends a bit on MB...chipset....

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2298540

[henfai]

Yeah, I was just wondering if I have both in the 680, and playing battlefield 3 on one and playing videos on the other, would that significantly lower the performance of game play as supposed to having the video playing through hd 4000 and having the 680 only dealing with battlefield itself.

[DaemonCantor]

henfai, Yes it would impact your Game. I myself have tried that and even with a Little Program like Speed Fan running on my integrated Video I get hiccups and Pauses in Games. I'm running at current my Backup System which is a Dell 531s that I have reboxed so that I could get an ATI HD5870 in it and it's integrated chip is the nVidia 650i....

That's about as straight forward of an answer I can give you other than try it for yourself and see what happens.