Multiple G450 PCI...

[frankymail]

Hey Hey!

Smee again :P

I wanted to know,
How many G450 PCI DualHead can you use in the same system? We have this "Wall-o-screens" that we want to put in the lobby at work, and we can get G450 PCI for $50, so those would be a lot cheaper that MMS cards... the machines we want to use have 5 available PCI slots (1 used by the NIC) put I presume that you can't plug 5 cards in the remaining slots (bus mastering issue? any other possible issue?)


Thanks for your time!

[vana]

It depends on OS and application you want to use.

With Linux and matroxfb I had 4 different Matroxes
(one AGP + 3x PCI) running in one computer at once, so I see no reason why 4x G450PCI should not work - if two will work, any number of them will work as long as you'll have enough PCI slots and good power supply. You'll need 2.4.19-pre5 or 2.5.10 or newer kernel.

Best regards,
Petr Vandrovec

[frankymail]

Does the G450 PCI need bus Mastering? in that case, I would just be able to have 3 PCI G450 ( in addition to another AGP card) in the system. But I may very be wrong...

[vana]

You do not need busmastering for drawing. Just some applications benefit from it (like XFree's DRI).
And because of these applications usually support busmastering only through AGP window (and only on one device), you'll have bad times with them.

But nothing prevents you from doing busmastering from every slot in your PC, and with most of chipsets AGP window can be used by any (PCI) device in your box, so it is just question of persuading XFree people to support more than one videocard in XFree, because of PCs with non-busmastering slots are thing of the past: currently every hardware piece wants busmastering: sound card, network card, IDE, video grabber, USB, ...

It really depends on what you want to do with these four G450 - whether you want large desktop in your X (in that case sorry...) or whether you want to run some specific multimonitor application (like powerstation control system) on them.

Petr Vandrovec