Triple display setup?

Question

Hi!
I'm building a Digital Audio Workstation system with 3 x 19"
(1280x1024) LCD Display's. Due to a noise-free reasons,
computer is located in another room 15m away. I have VGA Analog Extension cables.
Do you have any solution (suitable graphic card) for 3x analog VGA monitors.
I need a graphic card to feed 3 Analog VGA displays.
Thank you!
Best Regards,
Dali

Answer 1

The cheap solution would probably be to use a standard dual-head AGP (or PCI-e if you prefer) card,
and get a PCI graphics card to use with the third head. You don't need multiple PCI-e slots just to get
more heads - although you might want to check for card compatibility (it might be wise to stick to all
nVidia or all ATi, at least). I use a single AGP 3Dlabs card for two heads at home, and a PCI GeForce FX5200 for a third head. Obviously the performance of the PCI card suffers (surround gaming won't be
up to Matrox levels), but it doesn't sound like you need that. For this reason, I'm hoping people aren't going to stop producing PCI graphics cards any time soon (multi-head is convenient), but I'm wary everyone is going to transition to PCI-e and leave us multi-headers a bit stranded.
Alternatively, some motherboards with integrated graphics let you use the graphics in combination
with the main slot, which would mean all your PCI slots stay free. There's a new motherboard out
with a PCI-e *and* an AGP slot, plus integrated graphics, which claims five head support (two heads
on each card + integrated at the same time); The Inquirer mentioned it recently. It's quite possible
to do 5 heads with several PCI cards with a much less esoteric setup (or dual-PCI-e), but this might
be easier and certainly perform better than the PCI solution. Windows has had support for up to ten heads for some time, by the way - although some applications get confused with even two.
On the PCI-e front, it should be possible to stick multiple cards in to any multi-PCI-e slot system; you
just need an adaptor between the slots (although I've not seen one). It's entirely a physical adaptor
- the cards should negotiate down to a single link on their own. You don't need an "SLi" motherboard (except for performance - and, obviously, you won't be able to use multiple cards to accelerate a single display in an SLi fashion); any board with multiple slots should do. That's theoretical, though - make sure you can find an adaptor before trusting to that advice!
I hope that helps. Matrox (and nVidia) do good multi-head solutions, but they're quite expensive for what they are; if you have a machine to start with, I suspect a PCI card might be a cheaper upgrade path, and probably wiill do what you want.
Oh - on the other hand, a 15m cable (even good quality) is going to be on the limit (I don't know if you've tried it yet). Matrox do have particularly good RAMDACs, which might help offset the cable length. Have you considered putting together a fanless machine (or even an old laptop or two) and running VNC (or remote desktop)? If you don't need massive performance, you might get better image quality. A second hand laptop with VGA out and a couple of VGA PCMCIA cards might be worthwhile if you can't get the video stable at that range - plus you might get the laptop's own display. That's probably overkill if there's a chance of the analogue signal coping, but I'd be nervous until I'd tried it. You *might* do better with DVI, but you'd be out of spec on the length; at least the TFTs - if they can lock onto the signal at all - ought to clean it up for you when they sample it. Just a thought from the paranoid. :-)
Best of luck!
Andrew Garrard
IBM T221 driven from 2 DVI inputs
AGP 3Dlabs VP990 providing said two DVI signals
Iiyama VMPro 454
PCI GeForce FX5200 driving Iiyama (analogue)
Very loud computer
Even louder PCI-e solution on order :-)