On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 05:01:39PM -0400, Peter Arremann wrote:
> On Thursday 04 May 2006 16:59, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> > My boss wants to put together a Network Operations Center, with a
> > network monitoring server as the centerpiece. He wants that server to
> > have 6 monitors: 4 for network monitoring tools (rrdtool, etc) and two
> > for running commands and the like (ping, traceroute, etc).
> >
> > I know that with the right video card(s) you can have two monitors, but
> > has anybody had 6?
>
> 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.
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.
HTH,
Gavin
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