I have an i7-930 processor. Currently my motherboard (Asus P6T) has 3 x PCIe x16 slots and I am driving 6 monitors with it. (Another 2 via USB). There are 2 PCI slots and 1 PCIe X1 but I couldn't find a good, inexpensive video card to take those slots and still work in Windows 7. Is there any limit to how many PCIe X16 slots one can have on a given motherboard? (3 is most that I have seen so far.) Has anybody seen/used any other models that have, say 6 PCIe X16 slots on the same MoBo? If I can find one, maybe I can drive 10-12 monitors on my box.
It seems you're working on the presumption that you can only have two displays per video card. If you do some homework you'll find you can have more than two per video card. And yes, I have four PCIeX16 slots and three more slots after that on my P5K64WS. Asus has a "supercomputer" mobo and Gigabyte has some similar cards. Go to newegg, list mobos, then tell it to sort by highest price. You'll see them there. Then look around for the 4 display and 6 display video cards. A word of caution is that the cards which carry (push) more monitors take more room in your box. Nvidia NVS series are great cards for trading.
i have sort of similar question for PC experts-is it possible to run dual monitor setup using single output from onboard video source ? for example-this motherboard have single dvi port- can i run dual monitor setup using only this port? i'm talking about extended desktop,not same thing on both monitors.trying to find out if is possible to have dual mon. setup without any additional full size video card. Thank you!
No. You need one port per display. Even if you want to run only one monitor, you'll likely be happier with even a modest video card (like an 8400GS) in the x16 slot. The onboard video chip in any of these budget boards is only so-so... Years ago, these budget boards with onboard video chip had only VGA output. Now they might have, DVI, VGA, DP, HDMI... maybe even all of them. I believe that you can take your choice, not run more than one.
whats your opinion on how much bandwidth do we need to drive 2 monitors of charts/quotes on an inexpensive dual vid card w/o creating a bottleneck.. is 4 lane PCIe enough?
Thanks for all your responses guys. mgookin: No it was not my presumption. I realize that there are quads and also 6 video per card. I also know that they are quite a bit higher price (on per display basis) than a dual card. Currently I have 3 PNY dual cards on PCIe X16 and I certainly would like to try to re-use them. That prompted me to look in the direction of have a different MoBo.
If you want to get really crazy and be the first on your block to own one... there's a video card with TWELVE ports...