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
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