Need to set up quad monitors.

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yaric

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 9, 2006
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So I have a question about setting up dual or quad monitors. Basically I'm trying to setup a system with four 24" monitors. Can I just get a vid card with two DVI outputs to output to two 24" monitors a piece?

The main reason i ask is that on newegg, every vid card I can find says that it's max resolution is 2560x1600. If you put two 1920x1080 monitors side by side that will be 3840x 1080. So.. is that 2560x1600 for the video card with two DVI outputs talking about per screen or total output?

For the four monitors I'll just take whatever it takes to do two monitors then do it again to get the two additional.

So yeah, can I do this with two video cards or do I need four? Also, I wont be doing any hardcore gaming on them so will it matter if the PCI-E vid cards are in 8x slots on the MB instead of 16x?

Thanks for any help!
 
Max is 2560x1600 per DVI or VGA output, so you can run 2 screens at 25x16 each.
just grab 2 video cards and you are set.

Slot speed won't matter. I am currently running a GTX285 for 1 screen and a 9600GT for the other 2.
 
Alternatively depending on what your rig is, AMD allows you to use onboard video as well as discrete at the same time. So you could have your one good discrete card coupled with an onboard Radeon 4200 or whatever the most recent one is which are actually pretty damn good for free. And just about all the AMD motherboards with onboard video have two outputs on them. It's called surroundview.
 
I did this for work recently. Had to setup 2 PC's with 4 displays each for a tradeshow.

One PC was easy.. it had two 16x PCIe slots.

The other one only had an mATX board with 1xPCIe and then PCI slots... I purchased a 30$ ATI 7000 PCI card and could not get it to work at all (tried xp, vista and 7 lol).

I guess all I'm saying is if you're not sure let us know what your motherboard is and we could maybe provide some feedback.
 
ATI has a few workstation cards that offer 4 displays. FirePro 2450 and the new 2460. The cheapest I found online starts from $249.99. But like Druneau said, letting us know what your motherboard can support will give us a better idea.
 
Don't know what the motherboard supports yet as I haven't bought that yet either. This will be a totally new system I'm building.
 
Well if you're going AMD then the onboard video plus one video card is your cheapest yet fully functional route I would think.
 
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