building a triple monitor PC

Question

I'm looking at building a new PC and one of my primary requirements is to be able to run triple monitors. I'd appreciate some advice about motherboards and cards I can use for this, in the mid / upper mid range.

I'm intending to run Ubuntu on it with Parallels Desktop so I can load multiple virtual windows machines, and I'm intending to throw a significant amount of processing power and memory at it.

I've been considering going for a Mac Pro as I've had good experiences of Parallels for Mac on that, but with the price of a suitably upgraded Mac Pro well in excess of £2000 I'm considering alternatives.

Although I've regularly built my own machines for the past few years I am not a hardware geek, so specific advice would be appreciated.

EDIT: Thanks for answers so far. I certainly want to use a motherboard with twin PCI-Express16 slots so I can maximum performance on all screens, and I was certainly thinking on a quad core and at least 4Gb memory (I can afford to go up to $2000 on this, although I'd prefer to keep it to $1700 if possible).

I also have windows licences available (as a registered Windows developer), although I run Ubuntu on one of my workstations and I'm quite comfortable with that. Are there any advantages to using either Windows or Ubuntu as the native OS ?

Any specific motherboard/graphics card/cpu recommendations?

Answer 1

Depending on what you want, you can simply throw a bunch of video cards together and use software to make them function as you'd wish.

Unless you need significantly more processing power, I'd say a couple of Nvidia GeForce 9800GT's (each with 2x DVI ports) would be more than enough. Just make sure the motherboard has at least 2 PCIe slots. An advantage to using the same video cards is that you can use SLI to get a nice grapics performance boost.

The video card you choose can be anything, so long as it has enough outputs. And as mentioned above, try to match it to take advantage of SLI/Crossfire. This also will impact the motherboard you choose, as will the processor.

If money is an important consideration, then you may wish to use a single PCIe video card which is somewhat powerful, to run the first two monitors, and then a more "low-end" PCI video card for the third monitor.

Answer 2

As someone already mentioned, it might make more sense to build or buy a PC instead of a Mac, unless you really want Mac OS X as your host OS.

If you're running Windows or Linux as your host OS, you would use a different hypervisor instead of Parallels, but most hypervisors are pretty comparable in terms of features. Freely-available Linux hypervisors include VirtualBox, VMware Server, and XEN. Windows hypervisors include VirtualBox, VMware, and VirtualPC/VirtualServer. You probably don't want to use a bare-metal hypervisor (e.g., VMware ESX, XenServer, Hyper-V).

You can use any two PCIe cards with dual outputs, as long as your motherboard has two PCIe x16 slots (PCIe slots can be x16, x4, or x1--x16, of course, is the longest one). You might as well get two of the same type of card, since you're building this new.

Some motherboards with onboard video also allow you to still use the onboard graphics even when you plug a PCIe card into the PCIe x16 slot.

You don't need high-powered graphics cards, but you should invest in lots of RAM, as well as a fast dual- or quad-core CPU. The more cores you have, the more responsive your apps will be when running many guest OSes.

EDIT: I just ran across another topic where someone said Vista does not support heterogeneous video adapers--so if you end up installing Vista as your host OS, you will need to install two similar cards which use the same driver.

Also, remember that you technically need to have a separate Windows license for each installation of Windows. You'll have to activate each installation separately, and each one will have different activation codes since the virtual hardware (disk ID, network card's MAC address, etc.) will be different for each VM.

Answer 3

What you want is a Matrox Parhelia video card. Some models support 4 monitors natively.

Matrox has learned some lessons, as they provide Linux drivers for most of their graphics cards.

Answer 4

You could go for a simple solution such as the Matrox TripleHead2Go.

Windows/Mac supported.

It plugs into a USB port and gives you three graphics ports in return. There are different flavours of the hardware such as analogue or digital, depending on whether you have VGA or DVI respectively. All the information is in the link.

A couple of my clients use it and say it works flawlessly. It is really easy to install and manage.

Answer 5

Simply pop in two video cards, preferably ones that use the same video driver. I've got three screens on this box.

Answer 6

you don't really need massive graphics power for what you have in mind. Virtual Computers usually emulate some S3 GPU. a mainboard with onboard graphics and PCIe expansion slot for a graphics card with dual output out should suffice for your 3 monitors. spend money on processing power (hardware assisted virtualization is a keyword) and plenty memory.