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 http://tinyurl.com/g8lwt 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 -- Open Fusion - Open Source Business Solutions [ Linux - Perl - Apache ] http://www.openfusion.com.au http://www.sharebot.net - Fashion is a variable, but style is a constant - Programming Perl