4 GPUs for 16 monitors?

[ZWELINHTET]

Anyone got any experience on a PC that has one or two CPU with 4 GPUs that's gonna be connected to 16 monitors (4K monitors but gonna run those in just 1080p).

Not gonna overkill but this ain't gonna be a budget one either.

Targeting cost per performance, I guess?

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Already have 16 monitors mounted on the wall.

Already have a bunch of GPUs laying around the office.

Already have 32GB x 4 and 16GB x 8 RAMs from other builds.

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Sorry for the mspaint picture.
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Budget (including currency): 5000 US$ or 500,000 Japanese Yen

Country: Japan

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Real time remote control of servers and office security managements.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

Already have 16 monitors (and its cables), RAMs, GPUs (4 of 2070 Super and 4 of 2080 Super).

 

 

 

EDIT 01 : I was hoping getting something like this one.

 

[Biomecanoid]

Can you even fit and connect 4 GPUs in your PC ?

 

[Pixel5]

i guess by office security management you mean monitoring security cameras?

 

overall the only reason to do a build like this is when you want to game on the system, if the main thing you want to do is have video feeds running you are far better off running this on a separate PC and using less monitors but really big ones so you can simply display multiple video feeds on the same screen.

 

[ZWELINHTET]

5 minutes ago, Biomecanoid said:

Can you even fit and connect 4 GPUs in your PC ?

 

@Biomecanoid If you're talking about the case, I think the Corsair Full Tower might be able to fit those.
I'm not sure what motherboard have 4GPUs with nice space between each of the slot though.

 

3 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

i guess by office security management you mean monitoring security cameras?

 

overall the only reason to do a build like this is when you want to game on the system, if the main thing you want to do is have video feeds running you are far better off running this on a separate PC and using less monitors but really big ones so you can simply display multiple video feeds on the same screen.

 

@Pixel5 Actually, the purpose of that system is to show off to some top end customers.

I doesn't have to make sense though. It just need to be within the 5000$ budget and a bit shiny.

 

By the way, those 16 monitors need to show 16 different contents at the same time.

[TomvanWijnen]

I don't have experience with 2 GPUs and 16 monitors, but I do have experience with 2 GPUs and 5 monitors. That worked just fine. One of the GPUs was a GTX 680, the other was some 11-12 year old low end AMD or Nvidia GPU (I used each for some time). I was on Windows 7 though, but Windows 10 should work as well, I'd say.

 

Since you have the materials, I'd just start hooking them up!  Of course, first start with two GPUs, so you aren't somehow missing some crucial step in the beginning.

[mariushm]

Get a threadripper board and you'll have 5-7 pci-e x16 slots and support for more than 128 GB of memory. If you don't need processing power, there's cheap 8 core threadrippers that are cheap and still powerful enough. 

 

As for video cards, if it's just for that usage (showing surveillance/monitoring/playing videos etc) you could consider older single slot AMD workstation video cards, which have up to 6 outputs 

 

For example, you could spend  around 100$ on FirePro W7000 cards : https://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-FirePro-W7000-4GB-GDDR5-PCI-Express-x16-Desktop-Video-Card/113937984038 - single slots with 4 outputs and performance a bit lower than a gtx 1050 / about same as RX 560 cards 

 

Here's Techpowerup page for w7000 : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/firepro-w7000.c587

 

See also FirePro W5100 ... just older generation but still capable with 4 GB of memory and 4 outputs. Plenty of them on ebay and single slot.

 

W9000 are more expensive and dual slot, but have 6 mini display port outputs

 

There's other models in the series, w4100, w4300 etc .. but not sure if lower/older models can do 4k on their outputs, or if they're new enough to not have issues with drivers in Windows 10. They probably can and have drivers but double check. 

 

There's also older nvidia quadro cards which should have 4 outputs or more. a random example 140$ for a quadro 1200 with 4 displayport outputs incl. dp cables : https://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-Quadro-K1200-4GB-GDDR5-Mini-DP-DisplayPort-Cables-Windows-10-Video-Card/264877654798

 

 

No point wasting 2070 and 2080 cards on just monitoring.

 

[ZWELINHTET]

7 minutes ago, TomvanWijnen said:

I don't have experience with 2 GPUs and 16 monitors, but I do have experience with 2 GPUs and 5 monitors. That worked just fine. One of the GPUs was a GTX 680, the other was some 11-12 year old low end AMD or Nvidia GPU (I used each for some time). I was on Windows 7 though, but Windows 10 should work as well, I'd say.

 

Since you have the materials, I'd just start hooking them up!  Of course, first start with two GPUs, so you aren't somehow missing some crucial step in the beginning.

@TomvanWijnen I will. Thanks.

 

 

6 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Get a threadripper board and you'll have 5-7 pci-e x16 slots and support for more than 128 GB of memory. If you don't need processing power, there's cheap 8 core threadrippers that are cheap and still powerful enough. 

 

As for video cards, if it's just for that usage (showing surveillance/monitoring etc) you could consider older single slot AMD workstation video cards, which have up to 6 outputs 

 

For example, you could spend  around 100$ on FirePro W7000 cards : https://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-FirePro-W7000-4GB-GDDR5-PCI-Express-x16-Desktop-Video-Card/113937984038 - single slots with 4 outputs and performance a bit lower than a gtx 1050

 

There's also older nvidia quadro cards which should have 4 outputs or more.

 

No point wasting 2070 and 2080 cards on just monitoring.

 

@mariushm We were using 16 old laptops and desktops for it.
We then changed those with just desktops with 4 outputs and lower the device number down to 4 desktops.
Now we need to be just one PC for some unnecessary reasons. 

About the CPU, we might be using this as secondary rendering machine so I was looking at current gen Threadrippers.
We don't have to cheap out on the GPUs either since these 2080s and 2070s are lying around the office and not gonna use anyway.

 

This is my personal preference that I don't want to deal with AMD GPU driver crashes, so Nvidia it is.

[Pixel5]

6 minutes ago, ZWELINHTET said:

 

 

@Pixel5 Actually, the purpose of that system is to show off to some top end customers.

I doesn't have to make sense though. It just need to be within the 5000$ budget and a bit shiny.

 

By the way, those 16 monitors need to show 16 different contents at the same time.

the question is what is considered shiny.

if this is supposed to be a permanent installation and most of the monitors just show a static thing or video feed i would simply use a radpberry pi which can show something on two monitors and use a few of them.

 

using a 4GPU setup is needlessly complicated for this purpose.

[ZWELINHTET]

35 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

the question is what is considered shiny.

if this is supposed to be a permanent installation and most of the monitors just show a static thing or video feed i would simply use a radpberry pi which can show something on two monitors and use a few of them.

 

using a 4GPU setup is needlessly complicated for this purpose.

@Pixel5 I'm gonna need this to be used as a normal PC sometimes too. It's not about showing the same things over and over again.

Its purpose is
(1) will be used as a normal PC (sometimes)

(2) will be used as a single PC to show different contents like
      videos + CAD data + web meetings + hardware monitoring
      + sever usage monitorings *all at the same time.

(3) will be used as a part time rendering of Blender etc..

(4) will be used as one big video wall.

(5) looks unnecessarily expensive and custom made.