CPU and multiple monitors

[aatherton]

What effect does running mupltiple video cards and monitors have on CPU resourses? I am not talking about SLI or Crossfire but rather a system with 2 quad DVI cards and 8 monitors. would an i7 have a big advantage over an old quad CPU? Will be doing a lot of multi-tasking as well.

 

[MU_Engineer]

What effect does running mupltiple video cards and monitors have on CPU resourses? I am not talking about SLI or Crossfire but rather a system with 2 quad DVI cards and 8 monitors. would an i7 have a big advantage over an old quad CPU? Will be doing a lot of multi-tasking as well.

How many monitors you run should not affect CPU usage very much if at all, unless you run into a driver limitation/bug that kills hardware 3D acceleration (such as running a desktop bigger than 2048x2048 on some older Intel IGPs under Linux.)

 

[aatherton]

Thanks for the reply, I am start to spec out a system for financial research and stock trading, so far I have 2 Matrox quad cards, passively cooled for PCI 2.0 16 slots. I also would like to run a video card capable of 3d graphics and HDMI output for the main desktop display. It seems that I don't really need the latest, greatest CPU to run this platform, however finding a MOBO to handle three PCI 2.0 16 graphics cards keeps leaning towards an i7 CPU.

 

[aatherton]

Best answer selected by aatherton.