How many video cards can I install in one PC?

Factual Questions
1

I know XP home can only support one graphics card/monitor, and I know XP pro and Win98 can support two, but can I install, say, four cards in one machine? (assuming sufficient expansion slots exist). I know performance won’t be all that hot, but this is for an information display system, which won’t be refreshing the screens at a blistering pace.

2

You could try getting two sets of those interlinking cards that G-force used to make (do they still make them?).

Don’t know if that is of any help to you.

3

Without some more details about what sort of configuration you are looking to set up, I can only offer this article, which you may or may not find instructive. It seems they do make multiple-monitor video cards, which sort of sound like what you want, if I’m reading you correctly.

4

XP Home has multi monitor support - I don’t know where you’ll have gotten the idea it doesn’t. The maximum number dealt with by ‘display properties’ is ten, but the system itself can cope with more. The limitation is physical, because without four-head video cards, you’ll run out of slots very quickly.

5

I believe you’re referring to the 3dfx Voodoo2 card and their SLI, or Scan Line Interleave, technology. Two Voodoo2 cards would be installed and connected together, and they would each render alternate lines. This actually gave you THREE videocards, as Voodoo2s could ONLY do 3D, you needed a seperate 2D card for everything else. More recently, nVidia has announced that they will be releasing a dual-Geforce FX 6800 Ultra Extreme using SLI technology. This graphics platform will require two PCI-Express 16bit slots on the motherboard, which will likely be rather rare for some time yet. PCI-Express 16 is replacing AGP, but most motherboards can be expected to only have one slot in the near future.

6

I’ve gotta echo GorillaMan here. . . WinXP Home can handle multiple card with no problem. Until recently I had 3 cards (1 AGP and 2 PCI) installed in my WinXP home computer. The AGP card was even a dual-monitor capable card, so I could hook up 4 monitors at a time. Good luck finding a desk big enough for that! :slight_smile:

If this is an upgrade and slots are at a premium, dual and even triple-monitor cards are an easy way to add display capacity. The only triple-head cards I know of are Matrox cards, which have excellent 2D display quality but very poor 3D performance. If good 3D display performance is needed, there are still tons of cards available by most any major vendor that can handle 2 monitors.

Unless you are doing some serious 3D displays, performance won’t be much of an issue. I never saw any noticeable hit for general desktop use when I had the 3 monitor rig.

7

I would assume that any modern OS will happily make use of as many cards as you can feed it, which would be a limit of the number of slots you have.

I remember when the Macintosh II came out in, what was it, 1987? System 6 wasn’t even out yet, let alone System 7; but if you wanted to fill all 6 NuBus slots with video cards you could have a 6-monitor desktop.

With the aid of this card and a couple of the accessories, I could hook up nearly that many and run them simultaneously from my PowerBook! (I’m not getting the overdrive doohickey but I am going to get the dualhead adaper so I can run a third screen, I haven’t had a triple-monitor setup in several years. The card itself I’ll vouch for, it’s nice.)

I don’t know if you would eventually “hit the wall” if you really set out to do so or not —get a G5 and toss in a daisy-chain of Magma Cards into all the available PCI slots and drop dual-monitor PCI cards into each of the 74 PCI slots and hook up 148 huge flatscreens and max out their resolution to something like 3840 x 2880 pixels each for a total of 1, 636, 761, 600 pixels…I dunno if today’s operating systems have the mem addresses set aside for a desktop quite that large!? But for anything you’re actually likely to ask them to do, I doubt you’ll find them incapable of it.

::imagines trying to find where the damn cursor arrow went on a 1, 636, 761, 600 pixel desktop::

8

I agree with the other statements.

Back in the days when Win 98 was new, I we given a tour of the Direct X testing lab at Microsoft. They were running Direct X testing on windows 98 with a 9 monitor display setup.

Windows XP has not decreased the number of monitors.

9

Mangetout, as you sure you’re not somehow confusing CPU support and monitor support? XP Home only supports 1 CPU and as many monitors as you have PCI\AGP slots. XP Pro supports 2 physical processors and as many monitors as you have PCI\AGP slots. 98 only supports 1 CPU and has multiple monitor support - but I dunno how well it works.

10

I got the idea from [here:

I’m reasonably sure I saw the same sort of info on the [url=“http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/howtobuy/choosing2.mspx”]MS XP comparison page](http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/20536/20536.html), once upon a time, but maybe I imagined it, or has multi-display support been added in some service pack?

In any case, what I’m hoping to do is set up a single PC with multiple monitors for a sort of information system not unlike the departures boards you see in train stations and airports; with different information being displayed on each screen, but only refreshing once a minute or so; no need for any fancy rendering or anything like that.
The graphics cards I have are all laughably basic PCI SVGA/XGA types - S3 trio or something like that; I probably do have five identical cards amongst them.

11

Yikes… coding again.

I got the idea from here;

I’m reasonably sure I saw the same sort of info on the MS XP comparison page, once upon a time…

12

That link is definately incorrect, on that one point at least. I’m writing this on a dual-monitor XP Home setup right now. However, the date of the article (Apr 2001) is IIRC before the public release of XP. So they may have been basing their information on a beta version, or confusion from MS, etc.

(There were, AFAIK, issues on Win 2K with dual-head cards - perhaps that’s the source of the author’s confusion)

13
      • I saw a discussion ofthis just recently–apparently it depends on exactly how you want the monitors to function. Any MS Windows since 98/DirectX 9 can span across up to nine monitors, but there’s some limitations in how the different outputs can be set up if you use MS Windows.
  • Depending on the brand/model of videocard you use, a current Mac can handle at least 12 (six cards with dual-monitor outputs) and can manage them any way you wish–each as a single separate output, or any arrangement of groups spanning each other. And since MacOS is Linux now, there’s probably a way to do it with Linux as well but the main point of reference was what equipment television news studios used for this purpose–and what they used were Macs (it was mentioned that the videocard firmware had to be changed to something different than normal).
    ~
14

It’s true that Windows only presents multiple monitors as a single desktop spanning the screens. If you want truly separate desktops on each monitor (somethign I can’t get my head around anyway), you have to go to Linux. And there’s some laughably buggy behaviour in Windows applications that haven’t been written properly with multi-monitor setups in mind - including Media Player only playing full screen on the primary monitor :rolleyes:

15
      • I can tell you one common BIG disappointment that often happens with people who pay for dual-monitor setups on Windows PC’s–they find that they cannot use video hardware accelleration (such as for games) unless the game screen is spanned across both monitors! You can have the whole desktop spanned across both monitors, but then DirectX also treats both monitors as one output–so to see the whole game screen on one monitor, you have to play it inside a window that will fit completely on a single monitor, which automatically forces it to default to software display mode (that runs slower than hardware mode). The last time I heard someone complain about this, there still was no easy way to get DirectX to run on only one monitor of a dual-monitor setup --that was using a spanned desktop–.
        ~
16

Nitpick: - Mac OS X is actually based on top of BSD, not Linux.