1 PC 18 Displays???

BillyMOO

BillyMOO

BillyMOO

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Hi Guys, hope you are all doing well!

I need some advice on a pretty crazy build. I'm building a system for someone who needs it to be able to run 12 independent displays simultaneously. This should be possible running a mobo with 2 x16 slots (Gigabyte Z370M D3H?), with crossfire support and 2 x Radeon™ RX VEGA 56 GAMING OC GPU's which have 6 outputs each + a 1600w PSU. Do you guys think this will be ok? It's definitely worth noting that this system will not be running games or video. It's just to display browsers/office applications across the screens so it shouldn't push the cards hard at all further than running all outputs at the same time.

They have also asked if 18 displays would be possible!!? I think it might be! Upgrade the mobo to something that supports 3 way SLI (Asus Z370 ROG MAXIMUS X?) and simply add another card. Obviously this would then require a 2k PSU and lots of cooling... but do you guys see any potential issues with a rig like this??

Thanks in advance for your advice
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What screens are they going to use? It may be better to use big 4k screen's with splits and padding to create 4 1920x1080 desktop sections per monitor\tv.
 
It would be a good idea if the displays were to be clumped together, but they are to be in different places. Also they will be TV's as the data shown needs to be nice and visible.
 
In different places?
How far from the PC?
Are they all displaying a different desktop?
Have you looked at DP splitters? With the correct adapters and the wind in the right direction, you can connect multiple independent displays to a single DP output. More elegant than filling a box with expensive, hot, and power hungry video cards.
 
In different places?

Yes, the venue will be equipped with structured cabling from each TV to a central location where this machine will sit. Likely HDMI over Cat5.

How far from the PC?

See above.

Are they all displaying a different desktop?

Yes, they all need to be independent.

Have you looked at DP splitters? With the correct adapters and the wind in the right direction, you can connect multiple independent displays to a single DP output. More elegant than filling a box with expensive, hot, and power hungry video cards.

As above, we have considered splitters but the client wants each display to be independent.

Thanks! :)
 
DP splitters can provide independent displays. Google 'MST hub'.

Matrox makes single slot 8 port cards designed for this sort of thing. Not cheap, but then neither are 1600W power supplies.
 
bremen1874 said:
DP splitters can provide independent displays. Google 'MST hub'.

Matrox makes single slot 8 port cards designed for this sort of thing. Not cheap, but then neither are 1600W power supplies.
Click to expand...

Ahh this is interesting! So in theory, I could use 4 of these out of a GPU with 4 DP outputs to supply 16 independent displays?

The only problem there is that they are around £140 each, so actually it may work out cheaper just to buy the second GPU.
 
You can get a 3 port MST hub for about half of that cost.

Just highlighting them as an option. Depending on the output resolution required they may not be suitable at all.

I've never had reason to use one, just aware that they exist.
 
Are you going to use a specific application or are you just going to load a browser / play video on each screen?

Might be easier to just setup a Raspberry Pi on each of the screens?
 
It's not that hard to do really, as you'd don't need a great deal of power from the cards. One of the systems I helped design and develop was for aircaft RADAR/ATC and that had 10 screen from one machine but could have easily done 12 or more.

What you didn't specify was a budget, and that makes all the difference on how you approach a project like this. So how much are they willing to spend?
 
Journey said:
It's not that hard to do really, as you'd don't need a great deal of power from the cards. One of the systems I helped design and develop was for aircaft RADAR/ATC and that had 10 screen from one machine but could have easily done 12 or more.

What you didn't specify was a budget, and that makes all the difference on how you approach a project like this. So how much are they willing to spend?
Click to expand...

Well... the spec I put together for 12 displays over two cards was around £1.5k. If I went to 18 displays over 3 cards it would up to around £2k or just over.

This kind of budget isn't a problem for them... but much higher would start to be an issue. Hence why we don't want to consult a digital signage provider. That starts to get into crazy money to essentially achieve the same result.
 
labcoattech said:
Are you going to use a specific application or are you just going to load a browser / play video on each screen?

Might be easier to just setup a Raspberry Pi on each of the screens?
Click to expand...

We did consider this, but it means managing lots of different devices rather than just one central PC. I don't have much experience with Pi's. Can they run office applications?
 
If your talking specific MS Office, then Office 365 offers a web version of the apps.

Multiple devices does require more managing but then if one fails they don't all fail.
 
labcoattech said:
If your talking specific MS Office, then Office 365 offers a web version of the apps.

Multiple devices does require more managing but then if one fails they don't all fail.
Click to expand...

Sadly I don't think this is an option as even though there are web versions of the o365 apps, the client wants to display inboxes by utilising the view options in MS Outlook. I don't think these are available in the web versions. Also one thing they wanted to avoid is remoting onto a separate device for each TV to change what it's displaying etc.
 
labcoattech said:
How will you manage the displays? Do you have an app that lets you see all the displays from a central point?
Click to expand...

Good point. I suppose there must be some handy bits of software out there to manage multiple displays, but ultimately it might come down to using teamviewer or similar to access the main machine from a PC near to the TV the users want to change. An interesting thing that needs to be considered! Thanks.
 
bremen1874 said:
You can get a 3 port MST hub for about half of that cost.

Just highlighting them as an option. Depending on the output resolution required they may not be suitable at all.

I've never had reason to use one, just aware that they exist.
Click to expand...

For more than 16 displays almost certainly going to need a MST/SST expander - Windows has limits of around 10 monitors supported per connection type in its frontend (despite supporting more in the backend) so you need stuff like nVidia Mosaic, etc. to get to 16 which is the total that Windows supports without a lot of messing around or using external expanders.

I've heard a lot of people have trouble getting more than 12 monitors working properly on AMD hardware and nVidia's professional solutions without external hardware also are limited at 16 total monitors. You might also run into the Windows canvas limits with higher end setups as well - something like 32768x32768 pixels max.
 
Rroff said:
For more than 16 displays almost certainly going to need a MST/SST expander - Windows has limits of around 10 monitors supported per connection type in its frontend (despite supporting more in the backend) so you need stuff like nVidia Mosaic, etc. to get to 16 which is the total that Windows supports without a lot of messing around or using external expanders.

I've heard a lot of people have trouble getting more than 12 monitors working properly on AMD hardware and nVidia's professional solutions without external hardware also are limited at 16 total monitors. You might also run into the Windows canvas limits with higher end setups as well - something like 32768x32768 pixels max.
Click to expand...

Thanks,

If for arguments sake we require just 12, do you think the two GPU's will manage this? I know lots of people are mentioning MST expanders etc but the GPU's are only ~£300 each and the expanders will cost similar and just means they are external making more mess etc.
 
I didn't think crossfire worked in respect that you can connect into both cards? I thought it was "just" the primary card that you could link into but it has been a long time since I've used CF.
 
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