Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

Not sure PCI is really your bottleneck.
See this card.

4 DVI outputs at up to 1600x1200 all supposedly out of a single PCI slot.

The same company's site also features several other PCI and AGP cards taht can be used in combination to also get you up to 4x 1600x1200.

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

[ QUOTE ]
Not sure PCI is really your bottleneck.
See this card.

4 DVI outputs at up to 1600x1200 all supposedly out of a single PCI slot.

The same company's site also features several other PCI and AGP cards taht can be used in combination to also get you up to 4x 1600x1200.

[/ QUOTE ]

What I was saying was:
1600x1200x24bpp/8= 5.76MB per refresh per screen. So you have 4 screens refreshing at 60Hz
5.76MB x 4 x 60 = 1.3Gb/s of data. Now you know that some of that will be buffered by the onboard 256 of memory but if he has a lot going on you will see sluggishness in the screens.

PCI has a max bandwidth of 132MB/s = 4bytes x 33Mhz. That is the MAX, not taking into account the protocol overhead and all the other devices using the same bus.

Just try disabling 2 or 3 of the screens and see if you still have the same sluggishness. If it speeds up, you have your culprit.

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

Generally the video card to use when using more than 2 monitors is a Matrox branded card. They are not so great of 3D, but the best in the business for 2D and multi-monitors. Most wallstreet trading stations use Matrox video cards so I am told.

Since I assume you will be doing mostly business applications and poker on your system, this is no doubt the way to go. The only problem is that the AGP bus is not designed to hold the bandwith of 4 monitors (from what I recall), so until recently these video cards were mostly PCI... and slow. Really slow. Now that the PCI Express video cards from Matrox are hitting the market you can have a whip-fast system. The only problem is you will also have to buy a new motherboard, ram and processor to go along with the new video card. I reccomend anything compatable with the AMD64 series, they are all fast and very afordable.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

TT knows PCs?

I'm so impressed!

The Doc

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

Thanks for all the input guys. I disabled two monitors and it runs completely fine. Are you guys really that sure that the PCI slot is the problem?

The guy (who allegedly builds these multi-mon systems for traders) I talked to on the phone when I bought this stuff seemed to know what he was talking about, and per his recommendation I got the PCI card. I told him what type of computer I had, and off the top of his head he told me that my motherboard wouldn't support a quad-display from the PCIe slot, but that it would from the PCI slot.

At this point, is it worth it to go out and buy some RAM and see if that fixes the problem, or do I just need to get a whole new system - one built buy one of these companies specifically for multi-monitor displays?

Thanks again for the help guys, and Astro I'm glad to amuse you.

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

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At this point, is it worth it to go out and buy some RAM and see if that fixes the problem, or do I just need to get a whole new system

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I disabled two monitors and it runs completely fine.

[/ QUOTE ]
You answered your own question. I don't think that adding RAM will help you. I also am not convinced that you need a whole new system. I'm afraid the guy you are talking to might not know what is going on.

Why didn't he recommend the PCIe version of your card?

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

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Why didn't he recommend the PCIe version of your card?

[/ QUOTE ]

Because he was afraid he was going to lose a sale if he also had to get The Dude to upgrade his motherboard, processor and RAM. And also perhaps because PCI-E videocards just hit the market within the past few months and are still hard to find.

Forget it Dude, out of your element.(always wanted to say that [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]). Don't buy new ram, it will only be a waste. Send back the PCi card and instead get a new mother board, new ram, and new procesor. If you PM me I can help you out, I build my own computers (faster, more efficent, and much cheeper). Or I can help find a comercial computer pre-built that includes everything you need.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

[ QUOTE ]
Why didn't he recommend the PCIe version of your card?

[/ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
he told me that my motherboard wouldn't support a quad-display from the PCIe slot, but that it would from the PCI slot.

[/ QUOTE ]
His company sells the PCIe version of my card for $160 more than the PCI, so I don't know why he would recommend the PCI over the PCIe unless my motherboard really won't support it, or he just didn't know what he was talking about.

Why would manufacturers make 4 DVI output PCI cards if they're so worthless? And why does dropping down to 2 monitors confirm that it's not a RAM issue?

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

Some poker clients are notorious resource hogs. To determine if more RAM will help (do this after having everything running) : Press CTRL-ALT-DEL –> Click the Performance tab. Look at the Commit Charge.

The Peak Commit Charge is the most RAM your computer has tried to use during the current session. If it is higher than your amount of physical RAM (512000), your machine is using the hard drive as virtual memory and that will be very slow. If that’s the case, more RAM will help – if not, you are going to have to get more processing power.

The guy didn’t lie to you about PCI Express. Unless your computer is very new and came with it, your motherboard doesn’t support it. PCI-E cards do not fit in a PCI or AGP slot.

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I run poker clients, Poker Tracker, PlayerView, Firefox, and iTunes.

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I can’t say for sure, but I think the stock trader software probably doesn’t put the kind of load on a system that you are putting on yours. I don’t think they are running a big, constantly updating internal database and a bunch of applications, but are instead running basically one program that just displays information downloaded over some sort of network.

Any way you look at, that’s a lot of data being moved around on your system and a faster / better computer with either dual processors or a 64 bit system would definitely help.

Re: Trouble With 4 Monitors
 

4-DVI PCI cards are probably not worthless if:

1) you're not running 4 1600 x 1200 monitors

2) you're not moving stuff around, and have something like stock tickers on 1 or 2