Overkill. Most trading rigs process only about 100 KB/s data. Even an NVS x1 card can handle 5000 TIMES that. Buy and throw away? Most 10-year old NVS cards still work... they were designed that way. You obviously have a blinded bias... not good for market analysis.
So obviously your 100kb/second does not translatei nto 3d animations of option pricings etc. The correlation between 100kb and the need of processing power for 5 monitors is like saying "hey, I ate pizza today, so the computer is faster". No sense. Same with 10 year old. Yes, maybe. Maybe some people run softwatware that does 3d projections of market data matrizes (option pricing etc.).
Maybe some do. And if they need the grunt, they should already know it and buy accordingly. That still doesn't follow that one needs a Ferrari to deliver pizza... and that a moderate car for delivery "sucks".
NVS 450 cards "suck" big time. Lots of peopel hae problems with some monitors not being recognised. It may require a few reboots till NVS 450 sees all 4 monitors etc... If it takes the manufacturer over 2 years to fix the drivers, it's just not a problem most people want to deal with. I'm sure there are set-ups that work perfectly but you don't want to base teh choice of teh motherboard or the monitor based on the graphics card. These days you just expect thing to "just work". On the other hand, NVS 295 are a great piece of kit. Also given the OP needs ot connect 5 monitors to 2 computers, he won't need more than 2 graphics cards per computer. So, there will be no need for expensive motherboards that support more than 2 PCIE slots. Well, it's common office applications like IE. Excel etc that make heavy use of WPF. It's so bad that on some setups disabling 3d acceleration completely results in a massive increase in performance whith these applications. Also. lots of people prefer to keep aero enabled, which is a mild drain on resources too.
I've heard where people were unable to run a 450 properly... but in each case that I've known, it has been on a "budget" mobo. You know, the one which runs about 80-90% of the world's computers and costs about $20? That's not the 450's fault... it's a problem with the BIOS... and that's the mobo maker's fault. Running 4 monitors is an advanced function... not necessarily universally supported on cheap mobo kit.
Try a 450 on an X58 mobo (not some el-cheapo $20 mobo) and report back. Bet it works "smooth as a gravy sandwich".
Ergotron stands are a rip off (just my humble opinion) http://cgi.ebay.com/Super-Six-LCD-D...244?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item43a0f9a1ac
all the bashing of the video cards and no comments on the monitor layouts? its going to be the NVS cards because we already own them - maybe we'll look at something different later down the line but for now its NVS 295 and 450's
I think your layout looks nice. I assume that the 2 vertical monitors can be panned slightly towards the trader's eyes? Same goes for the top row horizontal monitor, that it can be tilted slightly down towards the eyes? On my issue with the portrait config in Windows: when I tried it, I only had 2 video cards and 3 monitors. I am sure it wasn't the bus bandwidth issue. I don't have the resources and time to keep messing with it. I just want to advice to proceed with your plan with caution: set up a mock up test on one set to make sure everything works as you anticipated before rolling out to 5-6 traders. If you need to modify your design, it will be painful to do 6 times over.
I appreciate the advice. I played around today with portrait and landscape orientations today across two video cards (quad monitor setup) and did not experience any problems at all. I was able to change one monitor on each card to an individual angle and didn't have any problems or experience any slowness, etc. Cards were NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT monitors and the system was a Dell T5500 with dual CPUs and 18gb of RAM... not sure if that makes any difference but no issues on that setup. W7x64 Professional.