Graphics Card Suggestion

[Anthony Caruana]

Hi

I'm looking for a graphics card to drive 8 monitors at 1920 by 1080 resolution. I'm not looking for screen mirroring - I need to run an 8-head display.

TIA

[Jason Dunn]

Wow. Eight way display? That's so far beyond the consumer realm it's not even funny. 8O Other than going to Google (which I'm sure you've done) I can offer you nothing...

[Darius Wey]

Anthony, I'm not even sure that's feasible at the consumer level. If you head over to a computer store, you'll find graphics cards with one or two monitor connectors, but that's about it. Pushing it to eight, you'd need some sort of non-consumer level graphics card that has eight connectors, or a motherboard that will accommodate for at least four AGP/PCI-Express slots. I doubt you'd want to push it down to the lower limits and use the low-grade PCI slots for graphics cards, and PCI graphics cards are in such low stock and quality for that matter, that they're not even worth considering - especially if you want to drive your resolution to 1920x1080. And sadly, PCI slots are in abudance on motherboards, and multiple AGP/PCI-Express ports aren't.

Consumer-level, I doubt you'd get anywhere. Non-consumer level, perhaps... :|

You're wanting to do this from the one computer, right?

[Jason Dunn]

I just remembered that Colographic, the company that did the first VGA card for a Pocket PC, do the multi-monitor thing. How about this?

http://www.colorgraphic.net/newsite/products/xentera_gt8_models.asp

Xentera GT 8 (Available in PCI form factor)
Support for eight screen VGA output at up to 2048x1536 per display
Support for quad screen DVI output at up to 1600x1200 per display
Support for quad screen TV output in NTSC or PAL
256 MEG SGRAM total with four VPUs

It's $800 USD, which is pretty cheap all things considered. :-)

[Darius Wey]

Phwoah. Definitely not consumer-level. :P

Unfortunately, the Xentera GT 8 is only available in PCI. If you're not worried about a performance hit, it appears to do the job...albeit the cost. :)

[Darius Wey]

Actually, how long were you willing to wait to get this whole thing set up?

I'm sure you've heard of SLI before, right? NVIDIA have already extended support for 4-DVI display with an SLI capable motherboard. I'm willing to bet that if we wait around just a little longer, we'll see 8-DVI support too. (Perhaps). :)

[Anthony Caruana]

Thanks Lads

I was doing this for a friend and I suspect that the Colorgrpahics solution will do the job. But I'll keep an eye on the SLI option as well.

I nearly fell off my chair when I was asked if I knew of a solution to do this. My work environment has plenty of 4 head displays (and has had for a very long time, since the 90's) but I'd never been asked to find an 8 head solution.

Regards