One Gigabyte Motherboard, Four Graphics Cards

Features
By Patrick Schmid
published

Display Setup Options

Running Four PCI Express Graphics Cards

Things get a little tricky if you really intend to use four graphics cards, while attaching lots of storage devices at the same time. Expect a fair amount of "spaghetti" in the case if you add in a lot of components.

SLI With Four GPUs?

While four SLI-capable graphics cards could not possibly be linked using the SLI bridges, a quad GPU setup can be set up using Gigabyte's own 3D1 graphics cards series. As a matter of fact, the revision 2.0 models come with SLI connectors in addition to running two GPUs per card, making these perfectly suitable for a quad GPU SLI setup.

There is bad news on the drivers front, however. Right now, NVIDIA does not support four GPUs for SLI, as the firm presently does not intend to go in that direction. This leaves Gigabyte pretty much standing in the rain, because what they have devised is more than just something new - it is nothing less than anticipating what we are going to see in the future. Processors are increasingly going dual core, with multi cores to come to further share the workload. And things are not so different in the graphics arena either, where parallelism has been taking place for some time; we presently see increasing numbers of programmable shaders pixel pipelines.

Patrick Schmid
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ShrikeC145
    That looks absolutely amazing! Just wondering, what model of graphics cards are they?
    Reply
  • jealousfraud
    Three ways to Setup Multiple Monitors
    1) You can buy a pre-manufactured multi-monitor computer. The best place to purchase a multiple monitor computer is at: Multi-Monitors.com. They carry a multi-monitor computer line called SUPER-PC that can support from 2 to 16 monitors.

    Multi-Screen Computer Systems
    Multiple Monitor LCD Displays
    2) You can get a USB to VGA Adapter, or USB to DVI Adapter that will allow you to add an extra monitor to your computer via any USB2.0 Port. You can also add multiple extra monitors by using multiple adapters. This is a great option for viewing documents, surfing the web, using Microsoft Office and many other business tasks. This is not a good option for intense graphical situations such as HDTV, Blu-ray, Gaming and 3D / CAD Workstation applications. For those types of scenarios, it is highly recommended that you purchase a high-powered multi-monitor workstation or a Matrox Dual or Triple Head2Go.

    Multi-Monitor Adapters
    3) You can replace or add an extra video card to your existing computer, depending on how many monitors you wish to support. Although this sounds easy enough, this is a rather complex solution for a beginner, especially when trying to find a compatible graphics card. For this reason, I am going to write an entirely seperate post on that topic and will link to it here, very soon.

    Multi-Monitor Video Cards
    Once you have your multiple monitor system set up and ready to use, you will need to enable all of your monitors in your “Display Properties” Control Panel. Here is a great link to a complete and animated walkthrough of how to enable your multiple monitors in Windows.

    How to Setup Multiple Monitors (Instructions)
    This is what it will look like when you are done:

    Multi-Monitor Video Demo 1Multi-Monitor Video Demo 2
    Reply