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Hello Gerbils and Happy New Year.

I would like your opinions on what you think is the best way to run 4-6 monitors on a single pc. The computer in question has 2 pcie slots and was future proofed for this expansion. The chip is Sandy Bridge. More specs when I get back later this week. This upgrade will likely happen within 6 months since I'm now finding the need.

Anyway, my thoughts include those USB dongles or two cards that can run 3 monitors each. I was going to go the route of a single card that can run 5-6 monitors but I didn't want to use so many active display ports. I'm currently set on using two cards that can run 3 monitors each.

As an added thought, I'm not a gamer although I'll be prepping 1 of the computers to be able to do some gaming but that's for another thread. The gerbils here know a lot more than I do so I figured I'd best ask you all for advice.

The best way to run six monitors is to buy a single graphics card with six mini-DisplayPort outputs.
$240 is over-priced for the low-end gaming performance of a Radeon HD7750, but it fits into a single PCIe slot.
$262 for a Radeon HD7850 takes up two slots.

If you want to run four monitors from a single graphics card, all of the reasonably-priced gaming cards will do the job. For most of these, you can use some combination of DVI and HDMI for the first two monitors, but monitors #3 and up must use DisplayPort.

Thanks JAE. Do you have any thoughts on using two cards that can run 3 monitors each instead of using a single card like those you pointed out? I had future proofed the motherboard for this task by making sure it had 2 pcie slots. Just trying to weigh the pros and cons of using a single card vs two cards. Thanks.

You're probably less likely to run into funky driver bugs and corner cases with a single card.

ThatStupidCat wrote:

I was going to go the route of a single card that can run 5-6 monitors but I didn't want to use so many active display ports.

That implies you already know what the monitors are and they don't have DisplayPort so it would be handy to know what they do have. If any are VGA-only then that'll be an added complication.

If that is the case then it's worth pointing out sapphire does a FleX series of cards that offer three independant DVI/HDMI outputs, the low end 6450 is well priced - although offers no gaming ability.

If that's not the case then displayPort is probably the way to go. If you want more choice of cards then DisplayPort also supports USB-style hubs (called MST hubs) so you can plug four independant 1920x1080 displays into a single DisplayPort 1.2 output.

Many of nVidia's cards offer four screen support, although again at least one is likely to be DisplayPort these days.

p.s. When you say you've got space for two cards, is that true if either or both are double slot cards?

I'll throw my ring into the hat with a couple of Bonaire cards (HD7790, R7 260, and R7 260X)

The Bonaire chip is GCN 1.1 instead of GCN 1.0 and that includes a few things:

• A closer resemblence to the architecture AMD's driver team are focussing on (GCN 1.2)
• Displayport 1.2a for adaptive sync, amongst a few other things.
• Some improvements to Eyefinity, the GPU scaler engine, and Encode/Decode functions.

They're pretty cheap, you could get a couple for under $200 without even looking very hard.

@EndlessWaves

Yes, I already had an idea of what I wanted to do but throwing this question out here gave me some extra information and making me rethink the plan. My reason on not liking the display ports so much is that I think I need to use active display ports and those converters can get flaky from what I've read. I'm using one and sometimes the monitor on that shifts a bit more reddish than it should.

I was not aware of the FleX series and will look into it as well as the MST hubs. Thank you. Another bit I didn't know.

I believe the both pcie slots can each hold dual cards since they're spaced apart from each other.

As you can see, I know what I want to do but not really sure how I want to go about it so I wanted to see what are other options that I may not even know about.

@Chrispy_

Thanks for the suggestion. Will look into those as well.

Yeah, from what I've seen, active DP adapters do vary quite a bit in quality. Hopefully you can find one that gets good reviews, and get enough of them to run all the displays?

i have 4 on 2 cards and it does weird stuff. if you try to multitask 3d editing programs and use monitors from more than one card, the performance drops dramatically. it will go from 60+ fps to 10-15. for driver's sake, stick with one card.

shaq_mobile wrote:

i have 4 on 2 cards and it does weird stuff. if you try to multitask 3d editing programs and use monitors from more than one card, the performance drops dramatically. it will go from 60+ fps to 10-15. for driver's sake, stick with one card.

Another reason to get the Bonaire over older AMD cards:
DMA-based bridgeless CrossFire, avoids exactly this kind of performance limitation you get on older hardware. Our Oculus rigs are basically five-monitor machines with one of the monitors being switched on and off without rebooting - we found an R9 290 and an R7 260 work wonders together.

Having tried (and pulled my hair out), >4 displays with a couple of Nvidia 750Ti cards is just a glitchfest. It can be done but I'm not going to bother anymore; Whilst Nvidia was pushing 3D Vision, AMD was working on Eyefinity and the extra years of experience really show.

Is the gaming going to be on the same PC that has the multiple monitors? A typical Radeon gaming graphics card might have one dual-link DVI-I, one HDMI and two mini-DisplayPort outputs to easily drive four monitors.

In every AMD card I've ever come across with two DVI ports (really common config) the Single-link DVI port is shared with the HDMI, meaning you can run one but not both of those outputs.