On Thursday 04 May 2006 19:01, Gavin Carr wrote:
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Another solutions would be the Matrox cards - I was told the drivers work
pretty well and they produce a G550 in a 1x PCIe formfactor.
Peter.
