Video Wall, driving maximum area for the buck

[friism]

(this is a cross post from Toms Hardware forums)

I'm looking to build a rig to drive a video wall. I'd like the wall to be run from one machine for easier management. I'm planning to use cheap 24" LCDs as they have good area/$ ratios (slightly worried about brightness though?). I'd prefer the displays to be hardware accelerated (for video playback and such), but I don't expect to play high end games on them.

Driving eight 24" displays with four dual-dvi graphics cards should be easy, but can I go higher using just one system? What if I combine the four dual-dvi cards with matrox dual- or tripplehead-to-gos? Anyone has experience with this, or just thoughts? If you have more radical ideas, please share (projectors not an option).

Michael

 

[mpilchfamily]

There are motehrboards that support 4 PCI-e 16x slots. So you could run 4 video card giving your the 8 DVI ports you need. You can also use video splitters but then you have copies of the display and not independant displays.

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: friism
I'm looking to build a rig to drive a video wall.

You may find some guidance here.

digitaltigers

 

[sgrinavi]

There's alot more to display wall technology than a bunch of video cards. We install some, fairly large, systems for our DOD clients and will spend upwards of $100,000 to effectively drive a 2x4 display wall....

That's not to say that you can't have some sort of nifty PC driven toy.. it will just not have much, if anything, in the way of control.

Extron Electronics has most of the goodies

What do you want to display?

 

[Knavish]

Originally posted by: sgrinavi
There's alot more to display wall technology than a bunch of video cards. We install some, fairly large, systems for our DOD clients and will spend upwards of $100,000 to effectively drive a 2x4 display wall....

That's not to say that you can't have some sort of nifty PC driven toy.. it will just not have much, if anything, in the way of control.

Extron Electronics has most of the goodies

What do you want to display?

Of course, there are open source solutions that will allow you to do this with consumer level hardware and free software... I've seen it done at several universities.