8 screens on one machine

arnosv

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Aug 24, 2011
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Hi Everyone,

I have a Videowall of 8 46'' screens, now is it possible to controll them from one pc without losing any quality ? (HD)
I saw that ATI has Eyefinity for this, but only for 6 displays, and most of the time they use 24 inch monitors.

Thanks for reading !

greets Arno
 
You can use NVS 450. I has 4 Displayport out, just get 2 of them. You can't play games on this though. I have 1 of these and I just use it for watching equities.
 
You can also use 2 Eyefinity capable ATI GPUs to do the same. What is your budget and the basic specs of the system in question.

BTW, the physical size of the display (46" vs. 24") is of little concern. What is of concern is the resolution the displays will use. Most likely, your 46" displays are 1920x1080. Please include the make/model of the diplays you are considering. You may be able to daisy chain DisplayPort monitors with fewer GPUs (video cards).
 
we used 2 Matrox M9188's to run 16 22" LCD's from one machine. We used a Dell rack mount workstation and could have taken it to 24 displays

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/m_series/m9188pciex16/
 
^ +1


He beat me to it. The M9188 is a nice card. It all depends on what you're going to be doing with the monitors though. Streching HD video across any combination of HD monitors will reduce the quality obviously. There's only so many pixels in the source video.

 
All graphics cards will support two displays at HD(1080P) resolution.

A full ATX motherboard will have 7 expansion slots into which you can insert a graphics card.

Not all of them will be pci-e X16, some will be X1, or perhaps pci.
In theory, you could install a wall of 14 displays.

The graphics cards you use need not be expensive gaming cards.
Most any $50 card will be enough to display HD movies, or relatively static images like constantly updating stock charts.
 
Thanks for all the reactions guys ! couldn't react faster because i had a soccer match ..

so were planning on using 8 of these : http://www.samsung.com/nl/consumer/tv-audio-video/televisions/led-tv/UE46D7000LSXXN/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail&tab=feature

and the goal is : it needs to play a video all day long, no games or something, just video playback.

And what about the software ? let's say i have a ati card and have eyefinity. does it just work if you have the cables right ? because that's an issue aswell, it has to be as easy as possible. The people that are going to use it are not pro pc users.

i hope i have given the right info now and answered the questions.
 
Are you looking for just one movie to be played as one large imagewith 8 panels each showing 1/8 of the picture?

Or, are you looking for 8 movies each to be played on it's own screen?

What will be the source of the movies?
 
the first thing, just one movie spread over the 8 screens.

And the video's need to be made so we can render them in any format
 
Your hardware issue just became a software issue.

Do you have an app in mind that will do that? If so, what is it's requirements?

I have no doubt that it can be done, but I have no clue where to find such an app.

I don't think your PC costs will be much higher than a midrange pc with a few extra graphics cards.
 
no it's not like that. The videowall will be presented on a ''beurs'' ( don't know how you call it in english sorry... Something like Gamescom! ). it's not for personal use or something, people will walk by and look to it. The people that are going to build it up are not high-tech knowers. they just build it up and go away to thier next built.

hope you understand it now, my poor english doesn't help alot with it , sorry.
 
Geofelt, didn't saw your post, sorry.

Yes you're right, but we also don't know which hardware we are going to use for it so it's kinda both.

I was hoping that if i use eyefinity or something like that ( then it has to be a ati card i know ), that it would just work right away. but that's to good to be true aint it ?
 
I would go with NVS 450, its built for digital signages which seems to me is what you are trying to do. It does not have as much power as other video cards, but it is extremely reliable, low noise and low power, as well as low heat. Since you are 1 video over 8 screens, you don't need many processing power as well, nor RAM, nor power for the build
 
Okay i think that's good idea. Yes, just playback of one video that loops over the whole day. But do i get HD quality with these video cards ? By the way, the screen setup is like this :

| 1 | 2 |
| 3 | 4 |
| 5 | 6 |
| 7 | 8 |

( refers to the screens )

so that's a resolution of 3840 x 4320 right ? if i want to have HD (1920x1080)

And the ratio was 11:9 if i'm not wrong..

It's very nice that it has such good reliability, that's what we need.

So now i kind of now which hardware i'm going to use. But how do we tackle the software issue ? I don't think the pc would recognise the setup of the screens i think ? any good ideas ?

Thanks !
 
To get the proper dimensions, I think you are looking at 4 screens or 9 screens.

Each monitor will be 1080P or 1920 x 1080.

With 9 screens, it might look like this where horizontal and vertical dimensions are multiplied by 3:
|1| |2| |3|
|4| |5| |6|
|7| |8| |9|

Or, with 4 screens each multiplies by2:
|1| |2|
|3| |4|

Since a HD movie source will be 1080P, the resolution of each screen will be cut to 1/3 or 1/2 of 1080P
It will require some software to break up the image into quarters, or ninths.
 
You might need to get some multi monitor card, but also a card to help deal with 1080 p video, my NVS 450 doesn't handle 1080 very well on my 27''