I'm using an iRacing sim racing rig to get a lot of lap time lately. I didn't manage to get to the track at all this year in my spec 944 race car mainly because running a marathon was my priority. I did use my iRacing rig which if you haven't tried it is a very good substitute for learning tracks and so on.
My current system is a PC running Windows 7 64 bit. It has a quad core AMD Phenom 620 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a NVidia GT240 graphics card. The card drives a matrox triplehead2go digital edition that in turn is connected to 3 x 24 inch monitors. I have a logitech g27 wheel, fanatec clubsport pedals with brake pedal load sensor and a nice chair. It's basically a dedicated iRacing setup.
A problem so far is that my monitors are 1080p monitors. But, the system can only drive them at 1280 x 1024 rather than their native 1920 x 1080 resolution. This seems to be a limitation of the matrox 'splitter'. This results in the monitor stretching the picture to fill the screen and I get a lot of artifacts on the screen. A native picture would be a lot clearer and have a lot more detail, more pixels.
I purchased a more powerful graphics card this week, an ATI 6870. The 6870 has ATIs eyefinity technology which means one video card can directly drive 3 monitors. This means I don't need the matrox and also means I can finally drive the monitors at their native resolution. The only gotcha with the 6870 is that one of the three monitors must be a displayport monitor. Displayport is a new standard for connecting monitors to computers. None of my existing monitors have a displayport connector. They are all DVI or HDMI.
You can purchased another newer monitor or get a displayport to dvi convertor. These were expensive, about a 100 bucks and needed to be powered also. Lately, ATI is supporting a new type of non powered or passive connector. These are 30 bucks and I bought one of these.
So, the new gear is arriving from newegg on Thursday so maybe I'll have an update then.
