10 TV's on one PC

[antonyjlawlor]

Hi,

I have done a bit of reading on here but most the the questions where asked a couple of years ago at least, so I thought I would start a fresh one to see what options are available in 2018!

What I am trying to do
In short and keeping it simple, I want to run 10 x 4k TV's from one PC. Each TV will display a different image (I don't want them to be all combined together like one huge display).

I am trying to do this as cost effectively as possible, I'm already looking at some cheap TV's.

What I am not sure about is the GPU route I should go down, should it be AMD or NVIDIA? maybe even Matrox? ideally I would want one card that has 10 ports, but currently I can't find anything like that on the market, price would trump the ports though if there would be a cheaper way to do it using 2/3 cheap GPU's.

With regards to what will be displayed on the screens, images that will fade in and out. I would still be curious though to see if I could run 4k video content on all 10 screens, this is not a requirement though.

Thanks,
-Anton

 

[antonyjlawlor]

Any one?

 

[USAFRet]

Any one?

You have a very esoteric request.
Be patient.

 

[antonyjlawlor]

esoteric - first time I've heard that word! I would agree though, how many people out there need to support 10 displays.

 

[antonyjlawlor]

Everything I have looked at so far is pointing me to wards the AMD Eyefinity cards, some cards have 6 display ports on them.

I'm reading this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Eyefinity as a reference.

What I'm not sure about is if they will be able to 10 x 4K displays, individually, I don't want to span all displays and display one big image. It does say that the Southern Islands to Volcanic Islands range of chips can do (2–6x 4096×2160 @ 60 Hz) - I'm taking that to be up to 6 displays all individually running at 4K each?

TIA

 

[USAFRet]

What is the use case for this?
Why do they need to be 4k?

 

[antonyjlawlor]

With regards to why they need to be 4K, I need large displays for this project, 55 inch plus! Most if not all of new TV's at that size sold in the UK right now are 4K by default. I understand I can output 1080p on a 4K display, but I want the display to be pixel perfect. I also plan on using the 4K word to promote what I will be trying to do.

Use case wise, just image 10 displays in a shop showing different products on each display. The displays will fade a number of images in and out like a slide show.

Hope that makes sense,
Thanks.

 

[logainofhades]

This may work for you. That many displays demands display port being used.


PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor (£134.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: Asus - STRIX B350-F GAMING ATX AM4 Motherboard (£94.92 @ Aria PC)
Memory: G.Skill - Trident Z RGB 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory (£179.99 @ Aria PC)
Storage: Western Digital - Black 512GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive (£137.96 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: AMD - Radeon Pro WX 5100 8GB Video Card (2-Way CrossFire) (£349.96 @ More Computers)
Video Card: AMD - Radeon Pro WX 5100 8GB Video Card (2-Way CrossFire) (£349.96 @ More Computers)
Case: Thermaltake - Core V31 ATX Mid Tower Case (£61.99 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£89.99 @ Amazon UK)
Other: AMD - Radeon Pro WX 5100 (£349.96)
Total: £1749.72
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-04-19 15:44 BST+0100

 

[antonyjlawlor]

Thanks for that, those cards only have 4 display ports on them though? or am I missing something?

Thanks again,

This may work for you. That many displays demands display port being used.


PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor (£134.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: Asus - STRIX B350-F GAMING ATX AM4 Motherboard (£94.92 @ Aria PC)
Memory: G.Skill - Trident Z RGB 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory (£179.99 @ Aria PC)
Storage: Western Digital - Black 512GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive (£137.96 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: AMD - Radeon Pro WX 5100 8GB Video Card (2-Way CrossFire) (£349.96 @ More Computers)
Video Card: AMD - Radeon Pro WX 5100 8GB Video Card (2-Way CrossFire) (£349.96 @ More Computers)
Case: Thermaltake - Core V31 ATX Mid Tower Case (£61.99 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£89.99 @ Amazon UK)
Other: AMD - Radeon Pro WX 5100 (£349.96)
Total: £1749.72
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-04-19 15:44 BST+0100

 

[logainofhades]

There are 3 cards there. PCPP wouldn't let me put 3 in the video card section, so I put a 3rd in other, to get the price added in.

 

[antonyjlawlor]

Ahhh, didn't see that in other.

So that's just over £1000 for the 3 cards, pretty pricey! for me anyway!

I was hoping to achieve what I wanted to do closer to the £600 mark (I already have plenty of motherboards, ram sticks, CPU's etc so don't need to factor any of that stuff in, well maybe a motherboard but I'm just concentrating on the GPU's just now, sorry should have mentioned this in the original post.). I will probably go down the used card route as well if I can.

Thanks,

There are 3 cards there. PCPP wouldn't let me put 3 in the video card section, so I put a 3rd in other, to get the price added in.

 

[logainofhades]

Graphics card prices are stupid right now, due to mining, and those are workstation cards as well.

 

[USAFRet]

I had thought of daisychaned DisplayPort monitors.

https://www.displayport.org/cables/driving-multiple-displays-from-a-single-displayport-output/
https://www.jdhodges.com/blog/displayport-mst-lcd-list/

But 55" x 10 is probably out of your price range, though.

 

[bignastyid]

As far as the GPU side of things 3 of these
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/Kh38TW/asus-geforce-gtx-1060-3gb-dual-video-card-dual-gtx1060-o3g
Along with 4 displayport to hdmi 2.0 adapters would do it.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/EgoIggo-Adapter-Display-Resolution-Converter/dp/B076SCTQPS/

 

[antonyjlawlor]

Thanks bignastyid just out of curiosity why do I need 4 adapters? I’m not sure if the TVs I will be buying have displays ports on them or not, say they do though, can’t I just use 10 of the 12 available ports? If they are all hdmi only, won’t I need 10 adapters? I think there’s something I’m missing here in my understanding of how hdmi and display ports work perhaps?

Thanks

 

[bignastyid]

Thanks bignastyid just out of curiosity why do I need 4 adapters? I’m not sure if the TVs I will be buying have displays ports on them or not, say they do though, can’t I just use 10 of the 12 available ports? If they are all hdmi only, won’t I need 10 adapters? I think there’s something I’m missing here in my understanding of how hdmi and display ports work perhaps?

Thanks

The cards only have 2 HDMI ports each and I doubt a cheap 4k tv is going to have any displayports. so 6 of them on HDMI and the other 4 on adapters. But if they do have a displayport then the adapters will not be needed.

 

[toshibitsu]

If you go the route of using Thunderbolt 3 based eGPU's (Akitio and Sonnettech make them), you can "daisy-chain" multiple eGPU's together & have them all connected to the same desktop/laptop.

 

[Alabalcho]

Have you thought about placing cheap PC (RPi, Android etc) for each monitor, each running its own show (probably pulling from common storage)?

 

[antonyjlawlor]

Hi,

Yea this was another option for me, I started another thread over here where I mention it.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/running-10-x-4k-displays.2543744/

I know I could get 10 Pi3's and modify some config / clock files to get it running at 4K, it's just how stable its going to be at that. Cost wise I could pickup 10 Pi3's for about £320 (bare bones), I'm curious now if there are cheaper alternatives around the same price point that are made to play 4K. I'm looking and some android TV sticks just now.

I wonder if there would be a way to use chrome cast and cast from VM's running at 4K or something like that... would bring the networking speed into question then though I would image, and probably not as stable.

Apparently this thing can do 4K and at $15 !! https://www.pine64.org/?product=pine-a64-board

Thanks,

Have you thought about placing cheap PC (RPi, Android etc) for each monitor, each running its own show (probably pulling from common storage)?

 

[antonyjlawlor]

I've managed to find a motherboard with 10 USB 3.0 outputs, what about buying 10 of these https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adapter-Graphics-Converter-Windows-Support-black/product-reviews/B076J3VKMJ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_paging_btm_2?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=2

And running the setup like that? do you think it would work? I'm un-sure if running it this way put all the processing on to the CPU or GPU?

Thanks,
-Anton

 

[toshibitsu]

You could do that, but then it won't run off of your dedicated GPU and you won't be able to do gaming with them.

 

[antonyjlawlor]

You could do that, but then it won't run off of your dedicated GPU and you won't be able to do gaming with them.

Thanks for the reply, this isn't for gaming, simply to display a still image on each display, or a video for example.

-Anton

 

[toshibitsu]

You could do that, but then it won't run off of your dedicated GPU and you won't be able to do gaming with them.

Thanks for the reply, this isn't for gaming, simply to display a still image on each display, or a video for example.

-Anton

Then yes that will work. You may need to install the DisplayLink drivers for it to register each screen properly.

 

[punkncat]

If all you are doing is showing a series of still pictures, why not create (10) individual USB drives with the pics you plan each monitor to show?

Plug the USB stick in and run the slideshow individually on each screen directly from that purpose built file.

If you are doing individual video you could use something like a HDMI stick with each one referencing back to the shared file on a plex server or the like. If you got a smart TV with Kodi or Roku (etc.) built in and created a share each TV could do it's own pre made video.

 

[antonyjlawlor]

You could do that, but then it won't run off of your dedicated GPU and you won't be able to do gaming with them.

Thanks for the reply, this isn't for gaming, simply to display a still image on each display, or a video for example.

-Anton

Then yes that will work. You may need to install the DisplayLink drivers for it to register each screen properly.

Thanks again, but I don't think that link on amazon is a DisplayLink device, so how would that work?

@punkncat - The pictures need to be changed and controlled remotely, i'm actually developing some custom software to control each screen.

Thanks again