I am planning on buying 3 40 inch 4k screens as my new monitor setup and was wondering whether they could be hooked up to a single GTX 970 card (4k@60hz). The screens I am currently thinking about buying have got HDMI 2.0 and DP, which would allow for adapter free connections to two monitors. For the third one, I would need to rely on two DVI-D ports. There´s quite a debate on the internet whether thats a feasible option and I´d like to get a definitive statement on that matter.
My secondary option would be to use the 3rd screen with my linux rig (GTX 660ti via DP)
You could most likely do it but you'll definately run into Vram issues as the 970 only has 3.5GB of Vram. Unless of course this is for productivity and not graphically intensive workloads such as gaming, etc.
I am well aware of the limitations my graphics card is causing for gaming uses. The main intention for my new setup is productivity and CAD design. Games will most likely only be played on one of the three screens (mostly 1080p/1440p) or occasionally in a triple 1080 configurations.
Sure, you can connect them. If all the monitors have DP you can hook up all of them with Displayport cables directly to the GPU. I don't know what model of 970 you have but, if it has the same back I/O panel as the reference you're golden and you won't need any dual DVI-D connection to use your third monitor. Also if you're running a CPU with an integrated graphics card you can hook the third monitor to the iGPU and you're good to go.
Something to keep in mind is an issue that I ran into with my 43" 4K monitor: I tried using a HDMI 2.0 cable from my GTX 980Ti to the HDMI 2.0 port on my monitor and the signal was unusable. I used a different HDMI 2.0 cable and it worked flawlessly, so be prepared to deal with finicky cables.
You can do 1 panel off of the HDMI 2.0 on the 970, one off of the DP on the 970, and the last off of the motherboard's DP, but the Motherboard's DP may be limited to 30hz. I would recommend buying a cheap card to use just as a display output if the motherboard is not capable of driving the panel at 60hz.
I have the Wasabi Mango UHD430: 43" 4K AH-IPS monitor, and I really like it. I'll say this right now- it's big, and only took me a few days to get used to it because I'm coming from a 34" Ultrawide Samsung monitor (S34E790C) so the transition period wasn't so difficult. If you've got smaller panels I imagine that the transition will be more dramatic. Anyway, colors are really good especially with YT videos. (I'll post a link to a video that I used to test how well the monitor looks) I will say that there is a little bit of light bleed in the upper left corner, but it's not so bad that I'd want to return the monitor. I don't have any stuck/dead pixels, no issues with 4:4:4 Chroma, and 4K@ 60Hz tests just fine. Input lag isn't noticeable to me, however I've only tried a couple of games on it at this point (S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, Elite Dangerous, and a couple of older games from when I was a teen in the 80's Yeah, I'm old :-P) That's going to be it as of right now, but I really do plan on posting a review eventually. A crappy picture that I took a couple of days ago is incoming:
Given that the 8gb 480 is going to be $250 ish, when you sell the 970 afterwords, the cost really won't be much, and then life is a million times easier with display port
Also all the reference 480s on newegg are listed with 3 display port 1 HDMI
