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I'm shopping for a PC. A must-have is that it supports 3 monitors.

I found this PC on Newegg:

MSI Gaming Desktop Aegis R 13NUD-462US
Intel Core i7 13th Gen 13700F (2.10GHz)
32GB DDR5
2 TB PCIe SSD
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
Windows 11 Home 64-bit

and the picture has four display ports: 1xHDMI and 3xDisplay ports.

Only it looks like something is in the 2nd and 3rd display ports:

enter image description here

If I had to guess, I'd say they are just removable plastic placeholders, but I do not understand their purpose (perhaps to prevent dust? This seems futile).

What is the likelihood that there is some limitation on the graphics card so those ports won't function? It would seem arbitrary (but "arbitrary, pointless decisions that frustrate end users" seems part and parcel with tech manufacturers).

Do you see any reason this graphics card wouldn't support 3 monitors?

Edit: These are also in the onboard graphics ports, which heightens my concern that they are trying to mark those ports as unusable:

enter image description here

ryvantage
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2 Answers2

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ok, yes the card will support up to 4 monitors connected simultaneously.

see here for the base specs for the Nvidia 4060 (TI) family: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/40-series/rtx-4060-4060ti/#specsmodal

The plugs are simply to prevent any damage to unused ports due to exposure to forced air cooling (which can pack dust like no one's business). You will likely find if you order the PC in question, that all the ports have plugs. The marketing images show one port of each type exposed to be more comfortable to people who know what the port types look like and only noticed that the ports were labeled "HDMI" and "DP" a few seconds later (like I did). Also note that plugs like those don't generally come with cheap systems.

Showing the plugs informally indicates that this is a premium system that didn't cut little corners like stiffing you on sufficient shaped pieces of plastic that cost almost nothing, but aren't something everybody does. when well thought out, those kinds of things make the difference between being happy you shelled out for a premium part, and being indifferent to the build quality of the component you purchased.

You are overthinking this, but if you want to be absolutely sure, determine what OEM assembled the specific vid card in question, and look up the specs for the specific model (though they should not diverge from base family specs as regards supported monitor count).

Frank Thomas
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Yeah, they're dust covers.

Modern systems should be able to use all or some proportion of their ports, and with newer versions of windows, and PCs newer than the 3rd generation core processors for intel, and APUs for AMD, be able to use integrated graphics alongside the discrete GPU.

However, I'd guess unless you have a good reason, you'd not, nor will you be running multimonitor setups.

They've kept one of each type uncovered so a less technical user will hopefully plug in the correct cable and neither be confused by why the connector is covered nor which connectors to use.

The ones on the integrated card are covered not cause they 'can't' work, but they may need some additional setup on the bios, and since apps run on the GPU on the monitor they are on without specific settings (I've talked about the logic here) - plugging in a monitor to the integrated GPU and not setting the specific program to run on the discrete GPU would result in slowness.

The average user would be confused by all this, so telling them to "Plug in your one monitor into one of the uncovered ports" is simpler.

Journeyman Geek
  • 133,878