30 or more display from one computer?

[motoxrcr1]

Hi LTT community. I'm currently working on a project where we want to use 30 or more displays. I built a computer for projects such as this. It's specs are as follows: MSI meg godlike z390 motherboard, i9-9900k cpu, 2x rtx 2080ti founders edition graphics cards, corsair vengeance 32 gb (2x 16gb) ddr 4000 ram, corsair H80i V2 cpu cooler, corsair AXi series AX1600 -1600 watt modular power supply, Samsung 970 pro 1tb m.2 nvme ssd, and a blackmagic design decklink quad 2 sdi capture and playback card. Per white paper specs I should be able to drive 4x displays via each usb-c port on the graphics cards, 4x via each display port, and potentially 4x via the hdmi ports using a device like the datapath fx4. In theory I think that I should be able to drive 20 displays per graphics card, using both graphics cards and the blackmagic card would give me up to 48 displays. I don't plan on gaming on this or anything like that. This is more like an art installation, none of the screens would be more than 1080p resolution. We are starting to experiment with some displayport MST adapters on monday.  There is a chance that there will be some interactivity installed f or this project, so it's likely that I would need to use some of the sdi ports for camera inputs.  Please let me know your thoughts on issues that I'm likely to run into. I've attached an early render of one idea for screen layout. This is a mixed system that will use multiple types of lcd screens and projectors.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, motoxrcr1 said:

2x rtx 2080ti founders edition graphics cards

why those cards?

 

Something like a nvs 810 is a much better option here, single card that supports 8 monitors. Id just get 4 of those for this use here if you can.

 

3 minutes ago, motoxrcr1 said:

Per white paper specs I should be able to drive 4x displays via each usb-c port on the graphics cards, 4x via each display port,

THere is also a limit of max displays per card, and I think its 4 per gpu, no matter what mst hubs and ports it has.

 

 

[Brooksie359]

I mean there will be issues almost guaranteed. Something of that scale always runs into issues somewhere along the line and I dont even know if windows is set up to be able to have 30 displays on a single system. Will be interesting to know how it goes though. 

[emosun]

Well one issue i could see is the gpu might be able to support all those displays via their respective ports but possibly not all at once. There are quite a large number of video cards that share data with another port and simply have multiple ports for convenience. 

The other may be that activating 30 displays might actually run down the timer for the revert so even if the machine could run 30 displays it might take to long to actually activate them.

It also might have been considerably cheaper to use several low end machines rather than this single expensive machine , possibly more reliable as well as redundancy plays a big part in reliability.

[Bananasplit_00]

9 minutes ago, motoxrcr1 said:

corsair H80i V2 cpu cooler

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy dont get this piece of garbage...

 

i dont think you can get that many display outs from the 2080TIs, should be a limit of four per card. You probably want something made by Matrox instead

[motoxrcr1]

I originally built this for custom installs using about 8 displays. We do a lot of projects that require 5-8 screens. This project was just approved and I'm trying this to see what is actually possible. Yes the graphics card only officially supports 4 graphics cards but it should be possible to push much more than 4 from these. If using cheap MST hubs don't work then we are planning to experiment with a bunch of different hardware possibilities. One of which is using a program like watch out to control individual computers for each display or a few displays. Another is to use datapath fx4 video wall controllers. In re to the question about the cpu cooler, i grabbed that because the original one that i ordered online was damaged in shipping so i just ran to Fry's and grabbed that off the shelf as a temporary cooler. So far i haven't had any issues with it and it has been dead silent so i left it in.

[mariushm]

You could get a threadripper board with 5+ pci-e slots and a cheap 8 core threadripper.

For example, here's 5 pci-e x16 slots (some only x8)  : https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813145109

Or this one, 4 pci-e x16, one x4 and one x1 (so 6 in total, you can use riser cables/adapters to get full pci-e x16) : https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119006

You could also get some cheap M.2 pci-e x4 to pci-e x4 slot adapters to get more pci-e slots... the boards have the pci-e lanes : https://www.newegg.com/p/0X6-04KT-0NX99

 

If you want to be pro, something like single height Radeon Pro WX 4100 has 4 displayport connectors but can do 6 displays with a mst hub : https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16814105067

You can probably do the same with cheap 100$ RX 470 cards, but they'll be double height, most likely... and you'll have 3 displayport and 1 hdmi / dvi, something like that.

 

Six cards x 6 outputs per card... job done.

 

nvs 810 may support 8 monitors, but 600$ each? eh...