One Video Card, 12 Monitors

Jamie found a story that might make your jaw drop if you happen to have some need to put 12 video cards in your machine. Although if that isn't enough, you can always install two of these. I don't think I'm kidding.

Comments

Multi-seat Computing

[timeOday]

I think a 4 or 6 core CPU could support 12 users in many cases. I could see building a computer lab at a school this way to minimize administrative burden. But it's too bad multi-seat linux doesn't work better. I have struggled with it on and off over the years, and it just doesn't seem to have critical mass of interest to gain real distro support.

Re:Multi-seat Computing

[vlm]

Because of that you'd save little, if any, money over cheap systems acting as thin clients

Good detailed technical analysis, but I can get an equally valid argument by working a different angle.

Unless you're doing something real weird/wrong, the cheapest part of a computer lab is the hard drive, video card, chassis, etc. Zero that out, and you've got something very unusual, rare, and complicated, yet remains at 99% of the total cost, that being mostly salary and indirect costs (health insurance, pension, etc) and stuff like HVAC, electric bill, fractional capital expense of the building, cost of electrical and LAN wiring and related hardware... If you want to save a whopping 1% of the total cost of ownership, the very superficial answer is just install 99 computers instead of 100.

If your 24 room school costs $12M to build, which seems believable, then your empty room cost $500K. You can pull your hair out to "save" $2500 worth of hard drives and $1250 worth of chassis/power supplies, but that's a false economy. And you'll never be able to piecewise upgrade.

Re:Sounds good.

[rcpitt]

I currently run 4 monitors - used to run 6 but that was before I got the 1920x1280 units I currently have.

IMHO - you will never come close to having a paperless office until the screen real estate comes at least close to (or over) the desk real estate.

I write articles and code - and find that having the reference stuff up at the same time on another screen, with graphics on another, makes writing a LOT faster!!!

One Dozen picture frames?

[vlm]

Would this card drive one dozen monitors set up as digital picture frames?

I have a linux based file server in the basement that does not really do anything with its video output.

If I could hook up 12 picture frame monitors in various rooms of my house, that would be fun.

I don't want the extreme headache of manually updating 12 SDHC or CF cards. I don't want 12 individual stupid yearly subscriptions to some internet ripoff company that'll probably go out of business and make my investment obsolete the week after I buy them.

I just want to drop .jpgs into certain folders on my pre-existing file server and have the pictures randomly displayed thru the house, shuffling perhaps every 10 minutes. Also I'll have certain webcams periodically downloaded and added to the mix. And a cron job to display certain pictures at certain times, etc. A couple lines of perl, bash, and wget, thats what I'm talking about.

Re:One Dozen picture frames?

[Zerth]

How about 12 USB mini-monitors, with USB->network adapters.

A fair bit cheaper, unless you want 15"+ frames.

i have two of these 26" suckers:

[circletimessquare]

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=N82E16824255011

each is 1920x1200

i put one in landscape mode, then i bought an articulating monitor arm, and i put the other one in portrait mode. the setup looks schizophrenic, but listen up folks:

browsing the internet on a 16:9 monitor in portrait mode is a dream

try it some day. you capture so much of a webpage you are usually peering at through a slit you are constantly scrolling through with lots of unused screen real estate on either side

as a web developer, it helps too, believe me: the landscape mode screen for code/ packet inspection/ debugging/ email, etc... the other screen for a really good 10,000 foot overview of what you are actually putting up in the browser in terms of page layout

trust me folks: get a 16:9 monitor and put it in portrait mode if you browse a lot on the internet. it is about as good as it gets in terms of ui experience