advice for quad monitor setup

rl

Distinguished
Apr 10, 2004
15
0
18,510
Hey,
Im building a trade rig and need some advice. Running 2 PCs each with dual monitors is becoming tiresome. I want to drive four 1280x1024 monitors with a single dedicated PC. Ive done some googling and it looks like the single 4 monitor cards are ridiculously expensive ($400 up in uk). I dont intend to do anything hardcore 3d like play fear or quake 4 (already have a gaming rig for that). I was thinking of throwing together a couple of cheap 6200's or 6800's into an sli board with 2gig of ram and either a A64 3700 or 4000 or x2 3800 dualcore.

1)Will two 6200s/6800s be able to cope with 40+ 2d graphs/feeds and browsers spread over 4 monitors with such a high combined resolution?

2)In quad monitor setup sli mode will be DISabled. Does this mean the work load is not shared at all between the gpus and that the second card is effectively just 2 extra DVI/VGA ports for the first?

3)If Q2) is the case and only one of the cards is 'dominant' then would it possible to use say a nice 7600/7800/7900 as the primary card and then just a cheapskate 6200 for the secondary?

I dont trade too hardcore so dont want to drop $400+ on a single card solution from nV or matrox if i can do what i want to do with standard gfx cards which can be easily recycled into secondary rigs at some point in the future. I would rather use nV cards (driver stability) as the rig could end up being dual boot (linux) or recycled into a rip/burn drone or linux machine - and we all know how good ATIs support is for linux.

Would appreciate any advice/suggestions. Thx.
 
Question 1 - Yes, they should have no problem .

Question 2 - The workload is not shared but shared at the same time . Each card takes care of the monitors that are connected to that card . The only sharing is the two monitors sharing the same card . And the programs sharing both cards .

Question 3 - No, one card is not dominant on a multi-card setup . One card does become the output card in sli only but both cards share the workload for that output .

It all depends on how you set the monitors and display properties . I use two cards and two monitors but each is seperate from the other . The desktop is across both but when I bring the browser up it is on the monitor I set as primary . The other monitor is for running different programs or different sites on the net . It makes multitasking easier . I use UltraMon display program and it has all of the options I need for my setup . I have two Samsung 930b monitors and soon going to add a Samsung 214t in the middle of those so when I game it will be on that one in sli . The other 2 monitors will run off the second card for multi-mon . Just for some research go to google and type "multi-mon setup" and you will get more info than you need . I hope this helps .
 

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