+ some serious savings on room cooling. i have one 4850 card in one PC-that thing alone make my room warmer no less, but by few degrees ,as soon as i start playing something on vista. +1 for noise useless and most depreciating part of PC
A motherboard with 4 (or more) slots will cost you about 50 USD more then your average motherboard. So still a lot cheaper than the 12 output card. A wall with 48 x 30" monitors would measure 5,6 metres in width and at 2 metres in height I think you can only configure a maximum number of 10 monitors in XP, but there is third party software to deal with that, like the software included with the 12 output card. I don't see the need of a 12 output card, except for showing off at hardware conventions.
Not that big of a deal because the card is 3 slots wide. For multi-monitor trading systems, better to go with this: PNY NVS 450 - each card supports 4 x 30" monitors at full resolution - supports DisplayPort and DVI - based on the more reliable nVidia chipset - occupies a single slot - passively cooled (silent) - only draws 35W (cool) - PCIe2.0 x16 - currently $400 each
What's especially cool about the Eyefinity is that all of the monitors displayed by the card are seen as only ONE monitor by the OS... a new feature in gaming cards. Do you know what that means? An enthusiast might be able to display 72 monitors at one time!!! (Assuming a mobo with 6, PCIEx16 slots and the cards would all fit.... and you had a PSU strong enough to run them all.) Prolly give the user a radiation burn..
I have too much to look at with 2 24" monitors. wtf are you watching , 2 data feeds and 10 screens of porn?
The objective is to let you, the trader, have multiple views of the market data. It could be multiple symbols instead of one. It could be multiple time-frames of the same stock instead of just 1-min or whatever. It could be a market profile view versus multiple moving averages overlay versus a Renko chart. Avoid to be a one-dimensional trader. Some people achieve that by constantly changing the chart from SPY to AAPL to RIMM to BIDU to GOOG. Or changing the periodicity from 1min to 5min to 10min to daily. Some achieve that by having multiple monitors each tuned in to specific settings. Profitable or not depends on the skills of the involved.