On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 07:14:47PM -0400, Peter Arremann wrote:
On Thursday 04 May 2006 19:01, Gavin Carr wrote:
On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 05:01:39PM -0400, Peter Arremann wrote:
Get an SLI maonboard board and two nvidia graphics cards. That's 4 monitors right there. Then grab yourself a PCI board for the other two outputs... That's what I did here - works great with the closed source nvidia drivers. We tried with the open source Nvidia drivers and ATI cards - all fell short in one way or another.
We've got 2 workstations with 4 1600x1200 monitors running off 2 (non-SLI) Nvidia cards (5200s and 6600s, I think) using the closed nvidia drivers, and it works beautifully. The plans are to increase that to 6 or 8 monitors as finances allow. We're using nvidia TwinView across the pairs of monitors on the same card, and then xinerama to stitch them all together.
Sorry - I didn't word this well. I'm not running an SLI setup - just bought an sli capable system board to get the dual 16x slots.
Ah okay, same here then.
If you want to go 6, I'd recommend you look at using a mainboard with multiple PCIe slots - I've seen them around with up to 5 now, which would in theory allow you up to 10 monitors just using dual-output video cards. I imagine that bus throughput must become an issue at some point, but we're using Opteron mainboards (Tyan S2895s) and haven't seen any issues so far.
Most graphics cards require a physical 16x slot. They can function with 4 or sometimes even just 1 lane, but the power requirements and the size of the card are limits. Some boards have a 4x slot that is open ended, but these boards always have severe limitations on the types of cards since the slot isn't designed to support high power draw.
Right. But MB manufacturers are now starting to produce Quad PCIe 16x slot boards e.g. Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Quad Royal
They only do two-way SLI (mostly due to nvidia driver issues I gather), but for non-SLI stuff they should just work.
Cheers, Gavin
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