5 monitors up and running - heh!

[Diggs]

I had a service call where the guy is an mechanical engineer working out of his house. He had 5 mixed monitors set up on a rack (none with DP) and wanted them all to work off his Dell Optiplex desktop where he had crammed two cheap video cards in it. I enabled onboard video in the BIOS and pulled one of the video cards. Using a variety of cross-over cables (DVI-HDMI, DP-HDMI, etc.) I was able to connect 3 monitors on the video card and 2 monitors to onboard video. They all worked! I've never been able to play with 5 monitors in Display Settings. Kinda cool how you can stack them so the mouse movement can go straight up on to another monitor or sideways or diagonal or etc... Since his added video card cost him all of about $29 and probably has only 1-2 GB of memory onboard I'm trying to figure out how Windows is handling the memory requirements for 5 HD monitors? Hmmm.....

 

[Markverhyden]

Just hope he doesn't try launching a 3-d rendering job.

 

[GTP]

It is kinda cool how Windows (and Linux) handle multi monitor setups.
I have 3 monitors on my game rig and 2~3 on other PC's.
I cant help myself in that whenever I get a monitor traded in/given to me I have to plug it.

 

[Diggs]

Just hope he doesn't try launching a 3-d rendering job.

He mentioned something about Solid Works and I tried not to laugh....

 

[Sky-Knight]

It'll work fine, just won't render 3D stuff on the non-3D enabled displays. My memory tells me there's a setting in SolidWorks that deals with this... but it's been a LONG while since I've played with that one.

*Edit* On second thought they should all work because that Optiplex's internal GPU is probably capable of working just fine, not as quickly as the cards of course, but still working.

 

[HCHTech]

I'm surprised an out-of-the-box Optiplex will drive two video cards, but hey, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, yeah?

 

[Diggs]

I'm installing a Quadro P2000 video card today. It comes with 4 DP ports. Since a single DP port can daisy-chain 4 monitors, does that mean this card supports 16 monitors? (I'm being a bit facetious but what is Windows limit on monitor support?) (@add - I'm seeing a theoretical limit of 61 HD monitors based on a maximum Windows pixel count of 32k x 32k addressable pixels.)

 

[HCHTech]

I tried to look this up recently while building a workstation for one of our architect clients. Here's the blip from their specs page on the P2000

"Support up to four 5K monitors at 60Hz, or dual 8K displays per card. The P4000 supports HDR color for 4K at 60Hz for 10/12b HEVC decode and up to 4K at 60Hz for 10b HEVC encode. Each DisplayPort connector is capable of driving ultra-high resolutions of 4096x2160 at 120 Hz with 30-bit color."

It doesn't really answer the question precisely - it might drive more than 4 as long as the total resolution of all doesn't exceed (4*4096) x (4*2160). I would expect problems, though - cause that's just how those things go.

 

[Blues]

Usually the limit is the resolution support for the effective resolution of the combined screens. I have seen issues with this on older hardware trying to push 3 1080p monitors and research on newer hardware has shown similar type issue with higher resolution limits. Sounds like your example could push upwards of 8 1080p displays.