Crossfire Multi-monitor setup?

[nzorov]

Hi guys, my question is the following:
Right now I have a 4870 in my system and am running a dual-screen setup from it, but a friend of mine wanted to sold me his old 4870 for really cheap (~50$), because his upgrading. With the second card installed how many monitors can I have attached to the system - two or four (I'm planning on connecting the PC to the TV and using an old small 17' displays as a third monitor)?

I've searched the web for answer, but I found nothing that pointed out exactly how the Crossfire setup is working - is it using only the two connections available from the 1st card with the 2nd doing only rendering, or does it allow attachment of another 2 monitors to the ports of the back of the second GPU (4 in total).
10x in advance to anyone who can make things clear

btw, i'm really sorry if i misplaced the thread, but i don't actually know where it belongs

I don't want to get annoying with all these newbie (for some) questions but, if I get the Crossfire setup (2 x 4870) will I be able to do the following : Run all 4 monitors (as one desktop hopefully) and when gaming enable Crossfire, which will disable the 2 monitors connected to the second GPU and disable cf again when only in Widnows to get back all four of my displays.

And if i get a non-crossfire card (4870 + 4350 let's say) will all the 4 monitors works as one seemless desktop, but if the do with no problem, what if I run a GPU accelerated application (Photoshop cs4 for instance) and move the program window from a monitor run by the 4870 to a monitor run by the 4350 card, will there be bugs or performance drops.

Really sorry for the complicated and long questions, but is my first time doing a Crossfire/multi-monitor setup, so any advices will be accepted and appreciated.

[Dr_BenD_over]

And the fun begins. Despite any propaganda out there, unless something has changed recently, you may be able to run 2 displays with CF enabled. And getting 2 to work can be chore depending on the OS. From my own experience. With 3870's, displays 1 and 3 or 2 and 4 would work together with CF enabled under XP. With 4770's any 2 displays would work under XP, but NO combination would work under Vista x64 with CF enabled. With CF disabled it's fairly friendly but you'll probably want to stick to using the CCC to control the displays if you use Vista or Win7.

[nzorov]

10x :) That was pretty helpful, but I didn't quite get will the 4870 work simultaneously with a i.e 4670 (with all 4 outputs connected to 4 monitors) in the same system, ofc without crossfire (4800 & 4600 series don't match anyway).

[Kattivo]

I'm running 2 4870's in crossfire with 2 displays connected in Windows 7 x64 without any issues at all.

The 4870/4670 combo should work fine as well.

[Dr_BenD_over]

My bad, you can run 4 displays off pretty well any 2 cards in XP or Win 7, in Vista they'd need to use the same driver.