Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: How many displays can a single PC drive?

This is topic How many displays can a single PC drive? in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Lyle Romer (Member # 1266) on 09-29-2006, 11:03 AM:

Does anybody know how many 852x480 displays a single PC (a real powerful one) can drive?

Basically, if I wanted to set up a PC based video distribution system, how many quad video cards could the PC actually drive. In addition, how many mpeg streams could it realistically process at once and distribute out to the displays?

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-29-2006, 11:20 AM:

Windows XP can support a lot of monitors. The Display Properties applet has a maximum of 10 it can show. I've read about setups using 12 or 16 monitors.

Your motherboard and power supply will be the real thing that puts down a hard limit. You have only so many PCI-X, AGP or PCI slots available on a motherboard. Most better quality video cards have dual monitor heads. I think Matrox makes a device that can split one monitor output to three screens. The power supply becomes an issue when you have video cards that require a hookup to the power supply. If you buy cards more geared to accelerating 2D (like many in the Matrox line) then you may not have that issue.

On the number of MPEG streams, that maximum depends on a lot of different variables. Most new PCs can handle at least a couple standard definition streams right on the boot hard disc. You'll get more performance overhead going to separate hard drives and even more going with RAID. U320 SCSI RAID is pretty high end. If your application is multi-threaded then having a couple dual core Xeon processors would help.

Posted by Charles Greenlee (Member # 3856) on 09-29-2006, 11:28 AM:

Video, it's PCI-E, sadly. I have PCI-X, because I have a Dual Xeon serverboard. PCI-X is an excellent archetecture, but I've only found things like Raid cards and other device controllers for it, and network cards, no video cards. I have to use a regular PCI video card. I do think the video would benefiet from the 133mhz bus of PCI-X. A computer like mine, with vid cards for the pci-x would be able to power quite a few monitors.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-29-2006, 11:45 AM:

Am I reading your post wrong or did you really say there are no PCI Express-based video cards? There's lots of different PCI-X cards out there, many of them being full 16-lane types.

You can also still buy standard PCI slot video cards and AGP-based ones too.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 09-29-2006, 12:04 PM:

If it's a server board, it's probably 64-bit PCI slots. I've never seen a 64-bit PCI video card, though I've never really looked for one either. There are lots of other 64-bit cards like SCSI and network cards.

Posted by Jason Burroughs (Member # 68) on 09-29-2006, 12:58 PM:

Are you wanting the same deplay on all the screens? 1 image on multiple screens, or 1 image displayed across multiple screens, like a video wall?

Surely there are easier and more cost effective ways to do that than just throwing video cards at it.

Minicom makes a pretty decent distribuition system, using shielded Cat5 cables

Minicom
http://www.minicom.com/av_avds.htm

Posted by Charles Greenlee (Member # 3856) on 09-29-2006, 06:38 PM:

You're reading it wrong. PCI-X vs PCI-E. PCI-Express is PCI-E, not X. PCI-E is the new video interface, whereas PCI-X is a serverboard technology, that runs the PCI slot at 133Mhz, rather than the typical 33/66 Mhz. If I can find the article relating the two, I'll edit it in. I had to read up on it when I got my board.