Any experience with 4 head low profile/small form factor video cards?

[Albretch Mueller]

Matrox apparently has always claimed this market

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/qid_series/

But I was wondering about other options out there

Also, what are your experiences with the use of x1 and x16 slots? Do they have the same power consumption?

Any motherboards out there with, say, two x16 video slots?

Do you know of any -good- technical fora/mailing lists/papers out there about multi-seat environments?

Thanks
lbrtchx

 

[daft]

1. what do you mean exactly by 4 heads?
2. plenty of motherboards out there with multiple x16 slots. 1 even has 6
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131358
3. 1x slots dont provide enough bandwidth for the majority of todays graphics
4. yes, the x16 and x1 slots have same amount of power specs which is 75 watts.
5 multi-seat environments?

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

By 4 heads he means 4 outputs.

Not all 1X connectors are made to support the full 75W, be sure you check with the MoBo maker, quite often only 1 of the non-PEG slots is made to support heavy draw, the others are usually designed to account for about 25W (they may spec 75, but actually performance will vary [do you want spec power or clean true power? ]). It's a question of how they layout their mobo's power characteristics. Usually the heavy 1X slot will be closest to the CPU which is closest to the power management hardware.

1X is fine for most of todays graphics and applications, just not most of todays games. Which is why.......

Main questions should be , what apps are you driving to the 4+ outputs.

Yes there are other options out there from ATi and nV, but their base software is a little weaker, but 3rd party software is better anyways.

Yes, 1X uses less power than 8X or 16X, this is why lanes are disabled in powersaving modes for laptops and other efficiency concious PCs. The savings is minor for most people though, especially if you're working under load. especially on the lower powered multi-head systems, you'll find they draw very little power to begin with, and lane reduction might save a watt or two. Not much of a big deal to most people.

There are many mobos with dual 16X slots, with 16X throughput, but you likely wouldn't need more than 4X per lane (PCIe 1.1 even, let alone higher freq 2.0) for most applications that are multi-mon centric, and there are multiple mobos out there with four PEG slots that fit 16X cards, but run with 4 or 8 lanes.

As for forums dedicated to multi-monitor use, I would say it's more geared towards specific apps than that, but if you check out places like UltraMon's forums;
http://realtimesoft.com/multimon/forum/forums.asp?tmpl=UltraMon

or the Matrox forums themselves, you'll see more discussion traffic there on multi-mon, also on the Flight sim forums where there's alot of people with tweaked multi-monitor setups.