Video Wall Hardware Suggestions

  • Thread starter Thread starter James Wiggs
  • Start date Start date
J

James Wiggs

Folks,

I'm trying to build a Linux workstation to drive a large
number of LCD displays. Minimum requirement is 6 displays,
preferably 8 or more. I'm trying to determine the hardware
possibilities for this. It appears that PCI-express is the
coming thing in hardware, but I can't find any motherboards
that have more than 3 PCI-express x16 slots, and only one
that has 3, the JetWay 939GT4-SLI-G. I'm not even 100% sure
it will even be possible to populate all 3 of those slots at
the same time.

Many of the boards have 2 PCIe x16 slots plus another 2
x1 slots, but it appears that currently there is only *one*
dual-head graphics card for PCIe x1 on the market, a Matrox
G550 card with a paltry 32 MB of RAM. The specs I've seen
for it are lackluster at best. What options are available
if I want to load up a box with 4 dual-head cards and build
an 8-monitor machine? Am I kidding myself that this is even
going to be possible? Planning to run Debian etch with the
current XOrg 6.9. Not above using binary drivers ala nVidia
or ATI if that's what it takes to do the job.

This box will not be used for heavy 3-D rendering, 2-D
performance is much more important. It will be used to do
charting of real-time data, displaying large numbers of
charts simultaneously. The CPU choice is likely to be an
Athlon64 dual-core, and I've been looking at the ASUS A8N
motherboards in addition to the JetWay.

Is anyone out there running 4, 6, or 8-monitor configs
under Linux? How did you put it together, and what sort of
performance are you seeing?

thanks,
Jim
 
James said:
Folks,

I'm trying to build a Linux workstation to drive a large
number of LCD displays. Minimum requirement is 6 displays,
preferably 8 or more. I'm trying to determine the hardware
possibilities for this. It appears that PCI-express is the
coming thing in hardware, but I can't find any motherboards
that have more than 3 PCI-express x16 slots, and only one
that has 3, the JetWay 939GT4-SLI-G. I'm not even 100% sure
it will even be possible to populate all 3 of those slots at
the same time.
Click to expand...

Depends on what chipset the graphics cards uses and if the driver does support
multiple outputs. If you use the close source nVidia driver (works only on
x86 based systems), then there is no problem at all to setup the system to use
6 outputs (2 on each card).
Many of the boards have 2 PCIe x16 slots plus another 2
x1 slots, but it appears that currently there is only *one*
dual-head graphics card for PCIe x1 on the market, a Matrox
G550 card with a paltry 32 MB of RAM.
Click to expand...

Went to a local dealers homepage, looked into their list of PCIe-16X cards and
found a really cheap one, Gigabyte GeForce 6200TC 128MB PCI-e, just 60 euro
and has vga, dvi-i and tv-out, as many LCDs today has both VGA and DVI, there
won't be any problem to connect two LCDs to the card.

The specs I've seen
for it are lackluster at best. What options are available
if I want to load up a box with 4 dual-head cards and build
an 8-monitor machine?
Click to expand...

All depends on the driver, seen a 4 headed nVidia card once in the time (think
it was a GF2 card of some sort), but still as the driver just supports 2
output (at least the closed source driver), you would have 2 ports unused.

Is anyone out there running 4, 6, or 8-monitor configs
under Linux? How did you put it together, and what sort of
performance are you seeing?
Click to expand...

There are boards with PCI ports too, fill the PCIe and then the PCI ports and
you can connect more monitors.



//Aho
 
James said:
Folks,

I'm trying to build a Linux workstation to drive a large
number of LCD displays. Minimum requirement is 6 displays,
preferably 8 or more. [snip]
This box will not be used for heavy 3-D rendering, 2-D
performance is much more important.
Click to expand...

Have you looked at the Matrox cards? They're well suited for
multi-monitor use, especially given that you don't need blazing 3-D
performance.

They have PCI and PCIe (x16) quadruple headed cards. So you'd only need
two cards to drive eight monitors. Or if you use a mix of PCIe and
old-school PCI you can even go beyond eight monitors (at least in theory).

http://www.matrox.com/mga/pid/home.cfm

The "QID" and "MMS" adapters are the quadruple-headed ones.
 
James said:
Folks,

Minimum requirement is 6 displays, preferably 8 or more.
Click to expand...
I'm trying to determine the hardware possibilities for this.
Click to expand...
thanks,
Jim
Click to expand...

Someone pointed you to the Matrox cards, here is the Nvidia solution.
<no information on Linux support>

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_14605.html

Leadtek seems to have both the 16x and 1x versions, but I did not see if
there was a difference between them other than bandwidth/performance. The
picture they have of the 1x version does have both DMS connectors.


Might be helpful to look at:
http://www.unknownroad.com/projects/MADBoxes/
 
Folks,

I'm trying to build a Linux workstation to drive a large
number of LCD displays. Minimum requirement is 6 displays,
preferably 8 or more. I'm trying to determine the hardware
possibilities for this. It appears that PCI-express is the
coming thing in hardware, but I can't find any motherboards
that have more than 3 PCI-express x16 slots, and only one
that has 3, the JetWay 939GT4-SLI-G. I'm not even 100% sure
it will even be possible to populate all 3 of those slots at
the same time.

Many of the boards have 2 PCIe x16 slots plus another 2
x1 slots, but it appears that currently there is only *one*
dual-head graphics card for PCIe x1 on the market, a Matrox
G550 card with a paltry 32 MB of RAM. The specs I've seen
for it are lackluster at best. What options are available
if I want to load up a box with 4 dual-head cards and build
an 8-monitor machine? Am I kidding myself that this is even
going to be possible? Planning to run Debian etch with the
current XOrg 6.9. Not above using binary drivers ala nVidia
or ATI if that's what it takes to do the job.

This box will not be used for heavy 3-D rendering, 2-D
performance is much more important. It will be used to do
charting of real-time data, displaying large numbers of
charts simultaneously. The CPU choice is likely to be an
Athlon64 dual-core, and I've been looking at the ASUS A8N
motherboards in addition to the JetWay.
Click to expand...
You might want to experiment with Xdmx and some fast LAN, light machine
combinations.

http://dmx.sourceforge.net/

It does work, but please simulate the workload before committing to the
hardware. The advantage is you can use 3 machines with 2 heads each to
simplify the wiring - or even 6 machines with a single VGA.

I've done a similar job with an Athlon 64 running the X code, with Xdmx on
the same machine and diskless booting X stand alone on the displays.

Jon
 
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