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Since I do not know your budget there are several ways. If you are going via data management & control center. Hare is one way http://www.matrox.com/graphics... they have complete packages. And other way is to a multi PC using ATI cards well AMD infinity for every PC 6 displays. That would make 6 PC's for 42 displays to get and idea, here are some links. http://www.9xmedia.com/new/pro... http://www.techradar.com/news/... hope this helps.

No one here has used these? http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/th2go/displayport/

They need power and they're semi bulky (about the size of two decks of cards) but there's a VGA and HDMI version, they have no lag, they're cross platform.Lots of configuration and resolution options as well-- especially helpful if you have differently sized monitors.

Video techs and staging crews use them for video presentations or video installations. And the price point is better.

Every laptop I've ever had died from hinge-strain breaking the hinges.

This just seems like the worst of bad ideas possible. And it hinges on the side? God, that's going to put tremendous strain on parts of the screen that were never designed to hold weight.

Even if it's not just a con, there's no way that's a practical product unless the original laptop is designed for that extra weight and strain.

Yup, I am with you on this one. I am a lot more interested in this option, but I haven't got the cash (or desk space at home) to try it right now.

I'd say, ditch the nvidia setup and acquire a matrox video board. http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/ Linux supports matrox boards very nicely with all bells and whistles. Especially if you're only interested in hw accell 2d.

Connected 4 to 16 USB Keyboards (optionally mice as well) and connect same amount of monitors to a few video cards like: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/m_series/m9188pciex16/ or http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati-firemv-2d/ati-firepro-2450-mv/Pages/ati-firepro-2450-mv.aspx or USB to Video.... http://ca.startech.com/AV/USB-Video-Adapters/USB-DVI-External-Multi-Monitor-Video-Adapter~USB2DVIE2 There is software out here to create virtual machines for each monitor and to connect a set of Keyboard/mouse to each monitor. With Windows 98, you can connect up to 9 displays. With Windows NT, you can connect up to 20 displays to one system With Windows 2000, XP, you can connect up to 10 displays to one system. With Window Vista - you can connect minimum of 10 displays to one system. - possibly up to 16 With Windows 7 & 8, you can connect up to 16 displays to one system -possibly more

I guess also one of the reasons why, AFAIK, medical displays seem to show usually greyscale (at least 10-bit one at that, IIRC) with only few color highlights; and sometimes in a bit insane resolutions? (I actually thought one of those would be fabulous to have for almost all kinds of work done on a computer; if not for the price...)

Best way to get everything right is to order desingn from company that specializes for control room design. Yokogawa is pretty good.

Special suggenstions for computer hardware:

- Monitors from Eizo. They just make the best monitors for control rooms, medical imaging, etc. http://www.eizo.com/global/
- Matrox graphic cards are really good for control rooms. It's their specialty and they exel in it. You can get multi monitor worstations that are silent http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/

Graphics Card? 1x is hardly the cutting edge in graphics card bandwidth.

And yet, it's all the bandwidth I need to attach a less-powerful video card (such as the Matrox G550, which can run off a PCIe x1 slot) to my laptop, allowing me to dock onto another monitor or two on my desk quickly and easily.

In terms of number of outputs, Matrox has indeed been doing it for years. The difference is that their gear tends to be fairly expensive(particularly when you consider its brutally tepid performance) niche stuff. According to their price sheet, their 8-head will run you $2K. Their cheapest quad-head is $330. And these are for display controllers that are basically suited for 2D applications.

By contrast, the ATI stuff, with vastly superior GPU peformance, and typically more RAM, is cheaper. 5-heads will run you $220. 6 will run about $500; because you can't seem to get 6 without a 5870, which isn't a cheap chip.

This 12-head monster, since it is probably a relatively short-run enthusiast catcher, may well land in the ~$1000-~$1500 zone; but that will still make it cheaper, faster, and with more heads and RAM than the Matrox equivalent.

Hasn't Matrox been producing multi-output cards for years? How is this any different? http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/

World in Conflict can put a map of second monitor.

There is some number of games which do allow changing their field of view, and work quite well...
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/surroundgaming/en/games/
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/Essential_Games_List

Oh, forgot to mention this, which makes two displays possible from my intel graphics card, and xrandr.

Correct, and traders will hate this. We tried the Matrox TripleHead2Go a couple of years ago and it stretched the screen across...wait for it...THREE monitors. I never heard so much bitching about how hitting the maximize button made an app take up all three screens. Fortunately Matrox had anticipated this and provided a setting in the drivers to provide the desired functionality. I hope AMD is as insightful.

Well, of course, if you don't want on-board video then you MUST be a gamer seeking maximum performance!! Which means even the lowest low-end cards without fans are going to probably run very hot, raising the temperature of the entire case.

Not necessarily. You said you weren't concerned with xHz/$. It may be worth your while to check them out. None of the cards on the linked page have fans. I've used a few different matrox cards in the past and have been very satisfied. They make reliable hardware, with good solid drivers.

Of late I've been eyeing their DualHead2Go. Yes most laptops (these days) will let you work across both screens, but rarely can you get a desktop screen to:
1. Sit evenly with the laptop LCD
2. Be the same resolution at the same pixel density.

I don't work for Matrox, I'm a public servant. I just really like Matrox's products.

I've got a 12-processor Sun E4500 that I want to put some graphics boards in and use as a workstation, and I've been having an annoying time finding anything that fits in a PCI slot, has proper open source drivers, and has dual DVI-D outputs. The closest I seem to be able to get is the Matrox G550, but that can only do up to 1280x1024 for DVI-D. This looked perfect, even if I'd have to spend my free time for the next n months writing Verilog for it, until I noticed this.

That's right, you need a closed Windows-only tool to synthesize and download logic for the FPGA. Bleh. :(

Try the digital version [matrox.com] instead. Goes as high as dual 1920x1200.

Try the digital version instead. Goes as high as dual 1920x1200.

Here's your dual monitor support on the Mini.

They do. Just check http://www.matrox.com/.
They seem to have given up on the consumer market though, making their cards a little expensive (stating at around 100 Euros (in .de)).

I actually rather like Vista, suprisingly. Yes, even the UAC (it prevents my kids from installing random crap they found online while I'm at work).

However, there is one "feature" of Vista that would have been a deal-breaker for me, had I known about it ahead of time. I *still* haven't seen anyone talking about it publicly. So I'm here to warn you all that if you upgrade to Vista, you will loose multi-monitor span. As a gamer who loves the extra peripheral vision provided by using two monitors, I will *not* go back to one.

For those unfamiliar with multi-monitor setups, I don't want you to get me wrong: Vista supports multiple monitors just fine. However, most games don't. I think there are internal DirectX problems with making objects that have parts on two different display devices at once. "Span" mode is where your video driver internally combines the monitors itself, and presents the OS with what looks like one large monitor. This shows up in nearly every game as one extra wide resolution.

Apparently, allowing users to install device drivers which present the OS with a "virtual" display device like this could potentially allow a digial way around Vista's DRM, so its not allowed. In plain english, you can't play games multi-monitor because of Vista's retarded DRM!

The only way I found around this is with one of these nifty Matrox devices. They are kinda expensive though. The full digital model will run you about $300. The semi-digital two head model is more like $200. So if you are a multi-monitor gamer, plan on adding about $300 to the cost of any planned upgrade that includes Vista.

I submit to you that a RGU is a better option for the home than a complicated iSCSI PXE boot process where you have to construct a new image for every new machine.

Naturally Matrox has this one covered. RGU Link Fanless, no moving parts, you have all your USB and firewire and you're free to have a noisy PC in the basement with all the power you want. Much easier to setup and use.

I do agree though, in the work environment I barely get by with gigabit and 10gigabit isn't cost effective yet. I'm looking at upgrading the links between two of my switches but some of them don't even have the option yet.

Of course the thing I'm wondering is when fiber channel is going to catch up. 8gigabit throughput to the SAN is tight so you end up multi-linking and load balancing to get more throughput which is harder on the server so you end up adding more servers and distributing the load with a proper Linux load balancer. The SAN has plenty of more throughput available given that there are over 200 spindles so it's a shame the bottleneck is the network.

Remote KVM style solutions would have to send new video data over the wire before it would be available at the remote end

What was the resolution on that twinax? Did it do 1920x1200 times 4 (source: product info page)? Have the equivalent of 6 USB 2.0 ports? Support digital sound transport? Work on commodity hardware?

Remote displays have been around for quite a while, but this is the modern incarnation of it. I'm not going to turn town a terabyte SATA drive just because I used a DEC with hard drives in the 70s.

Because most of us (myself included) didn't know that such a thing existed until we read this story.

For the same reason IBM did it in 1970: so you can use a computer without sitting right next to it.

I use a Matrox Parhelia at work and Matrox's TripleHead2Go at home for Triplehead. Right now I'm using 3072x768, using one new and two secondhand Dell/BenQ 15" LCD panels. At work it's 3840x1024, using one LCD panel and two old CRTs.

Contrary to what many others have said, I find that one of the major benefits of Matrox's triplehead implementation is that as far as Windows is concerned it's one screen. This not only provides maximum compatibility with software not properly written to cope with multihead, but it means I can easily grab the entire three screens for, say, a wide Excel spreadsheet, Photoshop, or some complicated bit of code. Matrox do provide software to make the single desktop behave like three screens for the purposes of maximising windows, but I have that turned off.

On the other hand, a multiple monitor setup cannot benefit from SLI, which is a pain.

I'm almost thinking I should track down a USB VGA adapter and run a 3rd screen.

That's what Matrox is for. Their DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go allow you to attach multiple monitors that have the same resolution to the laptop at once. Though, I think there's some software weirdness if you want the benefits of having a window maximized on only one screen.

I can just see some idiot trying to wire some video card to fit in a PCI 1x slot

No reason to hack it when you can buy them.

Sure it would work, but how fast would it be?

PCIe 1x is adequately fast for many purposes. PCIe 1x bandwidth is 250MB/s (that's bytes, not bits), which is roughly the same as AGP 1x, and twice as fast as PCI. Both of these technologies are adequate for providing standard 2D desktop graphics. I wouldn't want to try playing hi-def video over a PCIe 1x link (1920x1080p @ 32-bit, 30 fps would need about 237MB/s, which doesn't leave a lot of headroom), but anything short of that should be possible.

It makes it nice that they have a standard that it seems they will be able to expand on for a few years, but it adds a lot of extra stuff to know for those trying to price a new computer.

Not really. You just need to remember that PCIe-16x slots let you run most graphics cards, other slots can be used for specialist graphics cards or other purposes. No different really to the old AGP/PCI slot distinction.

Is there an actuall graphics card out there that IS capable of doing the eyecandy stuff, it don't have to do games, that is fully opensource with absolutely no binary bits.

I used to think matrox cards were the way to go but even they have a binary HAL bit that you need if you want the more advanced features needed for xgl and the likes.

The second is also tricky because many of the better graphics cards don't have open source drivers. (At least, not drivers that support 3d accelleration, which is usually why people buy high-end graphics cards in the first place.) If Dell were to say "sure, we support Linux, just use the binary-only Nvidia driver", that approach isn't going to make a lot of Linux users happy.

Matrox Imaging has been offering a software product known as the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) for years which provides standard measurement functions and now even a metrology module that measures arcs, tolerances and more.

Best of all, it supports Windows AND Linux!

Is anyone testing these video cards in 3840x1024 yet?

Check out Matrox... They claim to have an external box that will do just that:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/products/dh2 go/home.php

Note: I haven't actually used one yet, just want one!

There's always - http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/products/dh2 go/home.php
But it's not the cheap option.

The Matrox G550 PCIe card works perfectly with the pure open-source mga driver that comes as standard with all recent kernels. I've been using it in my Dell 2800 server, and its record of reliability is 100%. While it's a lot slower than the blinding speeds you get from ATI or nVidia's binary blobs, it does do 3D perfectly. (And video and Flash too.)

Matrox even boldly proclaim their Linux source driver support on the box. That's quite unusual!

The card also has the distinction of being the only graphics card in existence that can run in a PCIe slot of 8 lanes or fewer, as it's a 1-lane card (all other PCIe graphics cards use 16 lanes), which means that it will work in traditional "server" chassis that tend to have 1/2/4/8-lane PCIe only.

And it's cheap and fanless too! I'm pretty impressed with it.

Intel manufactures the only technologically-current graphics processor which can claim to have open source drivers

Not so. I'm using brand new Matrox G550 PCIe graphics cards in my servers, and they're running the 100% open-source drivers that come with Linux. I didn't even need to use the Linux driver sources that Matrox supply on their website.

And furthermore, these cards and their open-source drivers run 3D apps without a hitch, although they're not fast compared to ATI and nVidia of course. (Not bad for fanless cards though.) Matrox also provide a HAL accelerator binary blob, but it's not needed in an open-source system.

So, Intel doesn't provide the only technologically-current graphics cards with open-source drivers.

Whereas Matrox does have one *totally exclusive* claim to fame: in addition to open drivers, the G550 PCIe cards are the only ones that will run in PCIe slots of fewer than 16 lanes (16X), and hence are the only ones that work with archetypal "server" motherboards that tend not to have 16X PCIe slots.

You should consider getting Matrox solution since Adobe Premiere and other 2d/3d professional stuff is their only focus.

http://www.matrox.com/mga/workstation/video/home.c fm

For example they have 10/12bit per channel output cards having plugins for Premiere.

Yes, matrox.com - their niche market is video post-production, so they were never affected by the 3D wars. A good number of the 25+ original 3D chip vendors are still around - most have abandoned the high-performance workstation/desktop market if not chip manufacture and went into either board manufacturing only and/or embedded systems - 3DLabs recently announced they were concentrating on embedded systems and laid off 100 people.

For a while, I tried maintaining a timeline of all the different 3D chip vendors starting from around 1995 (the days of GLint)with buyouts, mergers, lawsuits, but the DDR/SDRAM/RDRAM Samsung/Infineon/Mciron/Hynix patent lawsuit kept things boiling. The latest news article is RAMBUS settles lawsuit.

You know, Matrox doesn't have the fastest cards, but they do have Free drivers that support 3D. Since you've failed to mention them, perhaps you've failed to do your homework as well!

Wait a second, you want multi-screen on Linux with PCIe 1x? Screw ATI and nVidia; you want this!

There is no decent open-source graphics hardware at the moment.

Which 3D graphics card would you recommend if I wanted to make a top noch "open" gaming machine?. I would like a card whose drivers could exploit all the hardware properties...

One of these would fit the bill, I think.

A MATROX!

Silicon Graphics 'graphics' engineers are now nVidia.

Commodity PC hardware ain't gonna cut it.

http://www.s3graphics.com/en/index.jsp
http://www.matrox.com/
http://www.tridentmicro.com/

have died at the hands of
http://www.leadtek.com/ (foxconn)
http://www.nvidia.com/
http://www.ati.com/

SGI's fu is weak besides..

triple head on one card

AGP is obsolete. For PCs that were manufactured in 2006, it's pretty much Intel or binary drivers.

Whatever. Have it your way.
----
  The Millennium G550 PCIe graphics card brings the reliability, stability, and features of the proven Millennium G550 product line to PCI Express systems. The x1 design of the card makes it compatible with all compliant PCI Express slots - especially useful for systems with no available PCI Express x16 slots. In addition to having Matrox display drivers for Windows, the Millennium G550 PCIe is the world's first PCI Express graphics card with open-source display drivers for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

Sounds awesome! Until I read on the G550 PCIe product page:

• Dual digital flat panel support up to 1280 x 1024 resolution per display

Sorry, but 1280x1024 doesn't cut it any more (and I'm not going analog). Sadly, all of their products that I looked at seem to have this limitation (unless you go dual-dvi -- and then you lose dual-headed operation).

Sounds awesome! Until I read on the G550 PCIe product page:

• Dual digital flat panel support up to 1280 x 1024 resolution per display

Sorry, but 1280x1024 doesn't cut it any more (and I'm not going analog). Sadly, all of their products that I looked at seem to have this limitation (unless you go dual-dvi -- and then you lose dual-headed operation).

>> Does Matrox or Intel release source code to their drivers? (Is Matrox even still in the consumer graphics card business?)

Yes, Matrox is still in the business, but they're not really competing directly against nVidia and ATI in the games market -- for example, they provide no hardware vertex or pixel shaders in their consumer cards. And yes, Matrox does release driver source code.

I recently bought a Matrox Millennium G550 PCIe, and not only does it list Linux on the retail box alongside the other operating systems, but their product page proclaims it as "the world's first PCI Express graphics card with open-source display drivers for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems". And they're quite inexpensive too, which is nice.

The drivers are in recent kernels already too, although I'm getting "drmOpenDevice: Open failed" problems at the moment so DRI is being disabled and thus 3D isn't accelerated on that box just now. I hope it's just a local misconfiguration.

Not really sure what the status is beyond that, but in theory the G550 should have good support in Linux without needing any binary modules.

is there enough room on the back of a standard PCI card for three DVI ports side-by-side? My workstation graphics card has dual DVI outputs, plus an S-Video port. Even if you took the S-Video port off, there doesn't appear to be enough room for a third DVI connector.

Matrox's QID Pro AGP card ($600) product info page shows four DVI monitors connected to a single card using two outputs + dongles. It appears as thought the video card's two outputs are not standard DVI ports (LFH60), but the card includes two LFH60-to-DVI dual-monitor adapter cables.

If you want to see something really trippy, they also offer this product in a low-profile PCIe or PCI card, supporting four displays off a single output.