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(Yes, really?)

How can I manage to connect 5 monitors on one PC?
Up to 4, I can handle it with 2 video cards...

Is there any video card out there with 3 video outputs?
Is there any motherboard with more than 2 PCI Express slots?

I've seen pictures of setups with 6-12 monitors. How is this even possible?

Also, what kind of problems should I expect? (I've never had more than one video card in my PC yet, only one with 2 monitors).

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related serverfault.com/questions/14515/… – Daniel Moura Jul 16 '09 at 22:01
Update circa 2011, although this was true at the time of this question as well if you were willing to pay a ton: There are plenty of motherboards with up to seven PCIe slots. There are plenty of video cards that support 3 or 4 outputs (usually requiring DisplayPort, sometimes more than four if you're lucky). Building a PC with 24 monitors is fairly trivial in everything but cost. – Shinrai Jan 5 at 20:51
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11 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Some of the Nvidia Quadro cards have 4 ports on them. Technically it's two special ports, that each get split into 2 DVI or VGA.

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up vote 3 down vote

Motherboards that support 3-way SLI have 3 PCI-E slots. You don't have to run the cards in SLI mode. You can run them as 3 video cards.

http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_3waysli.html

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up vote 2 down vote

Jeff Atwood blogged about ways to connect multiple monitors over at Coding Horror.

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Yes, he also mentions why that thing sucks :-) – Daniel Magliola Jul 16 '09 at 19:34
Yeah. But it's better than nothing. I'm likely going to be purchasing one soon for my work laptop. – Jonathan Sampson Jul 16 '09 at 19:37
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up vote 2 down vote

The rigs that I have seen with many monitors were all done in one of two ways:

  1. They crammed as many PCI(-E) video cards into a PC as possible.
  2. They have multiple machines powering the different displays. This one is pretty popular with the flight-sim guys. Three big monitors for the cockpit front windows, and then many smaller screens for the different flight instruments. Seems to work well.
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up vote 1 down vote

Also, what kind of problems should I expect? (I've never had more than one video card in my PC yet, only one with 2 monitors).

Currently my work PC has a PCI and an AGP video card in it so that I can have three monitors. I think one of the cards has a couple problems (either that or it is the rather cheap LCD's).

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up vote 1 down vote

Matrox offer cards that support up to 4 monitors. Presumably you could have two cards in a machine.

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up vote 1 down vote

I've used the VGA Y-Cable Splitter (also available in DVI) to have multiple Monitors on one VGA (or DVI) Port.

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up vote 1 down vote

Some graphics cards in the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series and higher support up to 6 monitors from a single graphics card. Conceivably, if you have room for quad-Crossfire, you could drive 24 displays from a single computer. These are consumer-level cards, too.

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up vote 0 down vote

Two cards, each with two slots and one on-board VGA output out of the crappy intel chip.

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Every machine I've seen disables the onboard VGA when a card is present. – Dentrasi Jul 16 '09 at 19:53
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up vote 0 down vote

Also, what kind of problems should I expect? (I've never had more than one video card in my PC yet, only one with 2 monitors).

Expect a significant slowdown in performance as all of the monitors use the graphics card to display what they need.

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Especially if you end up using any "throw-away" cards – zildjohn01 Jul 16 '09 at 21:00
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up vote 0 down vote

In addition to your PCI Express card, you could put in some regular PCI graphics cards (yes they still make 'em). Depending on what you're doing there may be some performance issues.

You may also look for stores that target the niche groups that really have a need for more than 4 monitors and see if they have some special hardware.

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