Suggestions Please - Single Card for 4-6 WUXGA Monitor Setup?

phildelio

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Oct 12, 2012
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10,510
Hi card pros!

I am a novice when it comes to video cards so I thought I should go here for some advice. Today I have a desktop with multiple cards supporting six WUXGA (1920x1200) resolution monitors. I use this for photoshop, design, trading etc, which means 99% no gaming or other GPU intensive stuff.

Now however I am going with a laptop only setup and will be buying a "Vidock" from Villiage Instruments.(http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock). A Vidock is essentially an external video card case which is connected to your laptop via an ExpressCard.

Now my question is; are there any reasonably cheap video cards that can handle all of my monitors? I could go with "just" 4 and then let my laptop dock manage the 2 other ones, but I would prefer something that handles the whole enchilada. There are of course the Eyefinity6 cards, but they are quite pricey and probably wont fit the case anyway. I have also been looking at those external USB3 DisplayLink adapters but..I am sceptic :)

Low power consumption, passive cooling etc would be great, but doesnt really matter. Likewise the connection interface - HDMI/DP/VGA etc does not matter much either.

Hoping for some help and suggestions. Thx!:)


 
Pretty sure there are NO inexpensive cards that support MORE than three monitors.

Also, I looked up this box and it uses an ExpressCard output. I'm not sure how they can even suggest you can GAME using this. I believe ExpressCard output is about 500MB/second. Compare this to:
PCI-e v2, x8 (has 8x the bandwidth)
PCI-e v2, x16 (has 16x the bandwidth)

Most cards won't use the full x8 bandwidth but considering the difference it's something to be concerned with.

Even non-gaming use requires a certain amount of bandwidth. I'm not sure if you could even support six monitors just based on bandwidth alone.

IMO, you'd be far, far better off with a desktop. Not sure why yours is being scrapped (too old?) but you could easily build one for a little more than the price of that BOX since it's a non-gaming computer.

Important points:
a) Bandwidth issues
b) Reasonably priced graphics card only supports three monitors
c) Video box is fairly pricy
d) Desktop PC can be built for about $400 which would be far better IMO.