So, I'm usually a Mac (desktop) / Linux (VM / server) user, so I'm pretty lost in Windowsland.
I've bought the closest thing I could find to a Mac, that runs Windows: the MSI Creator series, specifically a Z17. It's got a very beefy GPU (NVIDIA RTX 3080), that I specifically searched out so that I could use a large array of external monitors and be more productive.
Unfortunately, I cannot, for the life of me, get three monitors to connect and work at the same time:
- If the internal display is enabled, only one of the two external Thunderbolt screens will function;
- but if I disable the internal display, both of the external screens will allow me to enable them:
After some investigation, I suspect the problem is that, no matter what I do, the new laptop appears to be "stuck" on the integrated Intel Iris graphics, instead of the NVIDIA GPU:
I've tried quite a few things:
Set a couple common apps to "High performance" in the Windows 11 settings, since NVIDIA says that's where you configure which-GPU-to-use nowadays,
![enter image description here]()
Set "Preferred graphics processor" to "High-performance NVIDIA processor" in the NVIDIA Control Panel anyway, even though it says in there that it has no effect nowadays,
Launched a damn 3D game in the background just incase Windows ignored my configuration in #1.
No matter what I do, the "PhysX configuration" above continues to indicate that all of my displays are connected to the Intel Iris. No matter what I do, three monitors won't turn on at the same time.
One last confusing confound, though, is that in the Task Manager, the usage-graph for the GeForce RTX 3080 is way more active than the usage-graph for the Intel Iris; so maybe the NVIDIA Control Panel is lying to me? But in that case, why can't I connect three measely displays to this g/d laptop? /=
There are previous questions on this topic, but they're all ancient - windows 8, or whatever. Things seem significantly different nowadays, at least based on the settings-panes I've been exploring.