Extend Desktop onto 3 or 4 monitors?

[see4th]

I am getting a mobo with two x16 PCI slots (can only use them as 2 x8's or 1 - x16 and 1- x1).

Question: If I get two x8 cards, can I set up 3 or 4 monitors and extend my desktop across 3 or 4 monitors?

Jeff

 

[Lord Evermore]

Yep. In fact you could also put a PCI card into every slot, and a card into every PCIe slot and run however many monitors you can get each card to support. Matrox makes 4-display cards, if you have a mainboard with 7 slots, you could actually have 28 displays, and then you could plug in USB VGA devices and have even more. The only thing that might cause problems is driver instability with lots of cards installed, but Matrox really focuses on making professional cards and drivers that specifically are good at that sort of thing. nvidia and ATI cards at least work well enough with two cards and 4 displays, though having both brands and drivers for the two kinds installed might cause problems.

You don't need to worry about getting cards that are "x8" though. PCIe devices are (supposed to be) compatible with all slots that can at least physically hold them, even if the number of bandwidth lanes isn't as high as the card supports. You can put an x1 card into an x16 physical slot that only has x8 lanes, or an x16 card in a physical x16 slot with only x8 lanes or even only x1 lane.

 

[vhx]

Actually most motherboards only allow 1 primary video adapter at a time, PCIe or PCI.

Even if you could get PCI cards and PCIe cards to work together, the PCI would not expand the desktop of the PCIe unless some type of 3rd party connector was in place (Which I don't know even exists).

On topic to OP: Yes, you can.

 

[Peter]

Yes they would. The only premise (with modern OSes) is that all the VGA cards in the system are multi-VGA capable. Sure, only one of them would get picked by BIOS to own the "VGA compatible" attribute, but that's only relevant for where the boot phase output goes. Windows XP will offer you all available heads for output - as long as the devices and their drivers have said multi-VGA capability. (Technically, what this means is, it can operate without owning the legacy VGA compatibility resources.)