Building a quadruple head system, need some recommendations.

T

Thaorius

Hi everyone, new guy here :).

I just bought a new workstation system, and now I want to turn it into a quadruple head system; but I'm not sure what to buy, from a driver support perspective.

The monitors would be 3 Samsung 23" monitors (D-Sub) and 1 Samsung 20" monitor (D-Sub).
My architecture is AMD64 and I'm running FreeBSD-8.0-RELEASE.
The system has an ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO motherboard.

As for my needs, I'm a software developer, and I rarely do any 3D work; thus, 2D acceleration would suffice, but some 3D support would be nice.

The motherboard comes with an on-board HD 4200 GPU and is CrossFireX capable.

So, I'd like to ask you guys for some advice, namely:
1) Can I make the setup work in the first place?
2) Do you know of any particular video card that is properly supported and isn't very expensive?
3) Which driver should I use?
4) Considering I'm running AMD64, would it still be possible to run the setup with 2 nVidia cards? (As far as I know there is no official driver for FreeBSD/AMD64).

Thanks for your time.
 
As to 4) -> the NVIDIA beta driver for amd64 (x11/nvidia-driver) has worked flawlessly since it came out, and will probably be promoted to 'official' in the near future. I'm running it as a dual head (laptop itself plus external screen (VGA), non-xinerama). Zero issues.
 
As much as I personally prefer open source drivers, I'd have to recommend nvidia in this case. Support for multiple radeon GPUs is spotty at the moment (it's better on Linux, but still iffy there, too). Even, if you could get Xorg to drive four monitors across two radeon cards, it would almost certainly disable direct rendering, which also disables 2D acceleration.

Adam
 
Ok, NVIDIA it is.

I've found a couple of pages with reports of the beta driver causing the system to crash, sometimes spontaneously. I don't have the URL anymore, but there was this particular post where someone described 2 systems, one of which crashed. The one working properly had a GeForce 8400 GS; which happens to be one of the cheapest boards I can get :).

Do you guys have any information concerning the new driver and quad headed systems?

Thanks.
 
I bought the 2 8400GS cards today. Installed them, installed the nvidia driver and auto-generated an X config file.

For the time being I only have the 20" monitor, thus, I can't test the multi head setup, but I have a good feeling about it, I'll keep you posted.
 
Well, I have been testing with 3 monitors only, given my new desk hasn't arrived yet.

I managed to get X working with the 3 monitors, and stuff. It works just fine, but the minute I enable Xinerama, X decides to crash after about 3 minutes of being started.

Any ideas?

Thanks
 
IIRC, if you're using the x11/nvidia-settings program to set your config files, it gives you the option to use TwinView or Xinerama (Xinerama turned off by Twinview if you choose that option.)

I don't believe you can have 4 heads across 2 cards set up with Twinview (I've never tried though, my max has been 3 cards with a dual-head AGP and a 1 head PCI.)

Maybe post the relevant parts of the X.0.log and your xorg.conf file?
 
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