Considerations for hooking up lots (~16) of Monitors?

[WhiteHotLoveTiger]

Hello folks! This is my first time on Tom's Hardware. I'm a software person, with very little hardware experience, so please be gentle with me!

I'm investigating the idea of setting up an installation of roughly sixteen monitors. This wall of screens would be part of an artistic installation. The graphics demand would be low: very low screen resolution would be fine, and the screens would be mostly showing static images, with fading transitions a few times per minute. The system(s) controlling the screens will be linux (probably Slackware).

I already have the screens, but I need to buy a system to connect them to. I'd like to figure out the cheapest way to do this. Some things I'm wondering:

-Should I get multiple computers, each of which controls a subset of the screens?
-Would a single computer with a sufficient number of graphics cards be able to handle this?
-I've seen strange looking devices which connect to a computer and create multiple monitor output ports. Are these reliable? Would they be a good candidate in this case?
-What things am I forgetting to think about?


I'm expecting I'll need to purchase a new system for this project, but I thought I should mention that I have an old HP Pavillion 521n. It's got a 1.4Ghz single core, with 768MB of RAM, and I believe the graphics card is integrated. It's quite old, but it's fine for CLI work, and even a lightweight GUI is okay once it's loaded. This old box has 3 empty PCI slots. Should I even consider trying to use this thing for my project, or part of it?

Thanks for any insights and suggestions.

 

[deadmaufive]

You could honestly probably get away with running a couple of HDMI Splitters with 2 or 3 Graphics cards running a low resolution. probably no larger than 1024x768 or so.