Out of Pod Experience

One 27", four 22" monitors. Trying to build a system capable of this. I have a topic going on toms hardware, but honestly I am underwhelmed at the amount of information I've received. It seems like very few have tried what I'm doing.

So here I am, looking for help from you guys. My original idea was to go with 3 nvidia gtx 670's. One card for the largest display, the others get two 22" displays each. Is this even possible? Can I use more than one GPU on the motherboard operating independently of each other? (No SLI/Xfire) I thought it was a simple matter of having enough GPU's to support the number of displays, but I'm not so sure now.

Also had an idea of maybe getting one Radeon 7950 with Eyefinity, as I heard that one card could support up to 6 monitors. But, I'm having a hard time believing that the one card, could play 5 eve clients at max settings without issue. Also, it was my understanding that eyefinity was for turning all the monitors into one large display, that's not what I'm trying to do.

I understand GTX 670's are a bit overkill for eve, but I plan to hang onto this system for a while. I would also like to do this without liquid cooling if possible.

Thanks for any response.

In before Rain

I run 6 monitors on 3 cards, but I don't know about running 5 clients on separate monitors. I only ever use 1 for gaming.

Not just possible, but downright overkill from certain standpoints.
A single GTX 670 could already easily handle all 5 clients on its own with processing power to spare.
The only downside of a single card would be that you could not use 5 monitors. You need a second card for that.


Yes.


Your initial instinct was correct.
At least as far as "non-SLI" configurations go, that is.
With SLI mode, it can get complicated.
Not that the display/desktop configuration would be a lot nicer for separately driven monitors, but still, should be less hassle than trying to SLI-it-up in that configuration.


The only POTENTIAL serious issue could be lack of video RAM.
A single EVE instance can have a wildly different video RAM needs depending on loaded textures (which depends on what the ingame simulated situation might be, flying a mission solo is obviously vastly different from being engaged in a massive fleet combat situation), but I personally haven't seen it go past 650MB or thereabouts myself (station-spinning barely uses 100MB extra or so, but no idea how bad a large fleet combat could get).
Even if you're paranoid about it, in standalone (non-SLI) mode, a ballpark of 1 GB of video RAM per instance/monitor should more than suffice.

You could even get mismatched cards if you don't really care about the SLI:
- one 4GB GTX 670 for the large screen plus two of the smaller ones, and
- one 2GB GTX 660 (non-Ti) for the remaining two smaller monitors.

EDIT: the thing with a SLI configuration (if you choose to enable it) is that most (not quite all, but most) of the video RAM requirements need to be duplicated on a per-card basis, since all cards contribute to all accelerated tasks, so they all need all the data. I'm not sure how well the bridge data flow works (nor if that's even a thing that actually happens) to "share" some of it between cards directly. Worst case scenario, you might want to get 4GB video RAM versions of all video cards if you actually want to do it all in SLI mode at some time.


You do know that the 700 series is coming out sooner rather than later, no ?
Probably best wait until at least the 760s come out and get some of those instead - they're also more likely to have more video RAM than the current generation, and use less power at the same performance level (hence need less cooling for the same game in the same resolution).

And two of them should be enough either way.
The third one makes cooling a bit more of a headache, but with just two you can stick with the default air cooling (especially if you space them apart on a board that can handle three in the first place).
Sure, the third one is very nice to have for when you DO want to enable SLI mode later on for heck knows what game you might want to play that actually needs all that horsepower, but, you know, "meh".

/me doing it since Windows 98.

Will look into that PSU. Thanks. Will post a pic when its all said and done. :)