New pc with 8 monitors!!

[chavo]

Hi.

My friend is obsessed with flight sim x. He has all the gear for it controls etc. any way he is talking about upgrading soon. Some joke has said he will build him a custom pc for flight sim, quoted him £3000!!

I think I have talked him out of it as that is silly money for what he was getting.

Anyway. I have seen on YouTube a pc with 8 monitors running flight sim, he is amazed by it and set his heart on it. I can only assume the guy is running 4 graphics cards, anyone have any ideas on the equipment??

[IronWarrior]

Minimum requirement is two cards in SLI or CFX to work so many monitors, that's it.

Nothing wrong with a computer that costs £3000 when you talking about computers that are designed for Fight Sims, if we add the cost for the Fight Sim equipment as in yokes, peddles, joysticks, fight dials controllers, that can easy cost £500 or more. It all depends how far he wants to go and how much he wants to spend to make it as real as he can.

Since you need some powerful graphic cards to power Fightsims with 8 monitors, you easy looking at £250-300 a card and you need a least two, so that's £500-600. (Basing on AMD cards) if we use nVidia cards instead then easy add an other £100 or more for each card.

Then you need a decent Motherboard that has 2 or 4 PCI-E slots, an really good CPU, a big case to fit it all in.

Sky is the limit as to say on how much it can cost.

Few years ago, I was planning on building a PC that was going to cost 10k, but that's a long story.

[jim]

Have a look at this for a top end flight-sim build: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1588587

Okay, it's not 8 monitors, but they are 30". Any more than that and you won't be getting a graphics card that will actually power it properly - this guy did a heck of a lot of research.

[Pob255]

As has been said it's actually quite easy to spend £3000 on a pc if you want.

Some joke has said he will build him a custom pc for flight sim, quoted him £3000!!

I take it you mean "some joker" as in someone trying to overcharge him for a system that isn't worth that sort of money.
The question is how knowledgeable is this person on FSX? You're looking at very specific hardware, ie the stuff that works best with FSX reguardless of other games or software.

To start with you need to do a load of research into FSX (there are very good forums devoted to FSX) and find out what the current best hardware for it is.
I seem to remember that it runs better on nvidia card but get no real bonus form sli, but that was a while back situation might of changed since then and you have to have multiple cards in sli to run surround vision (for multiple monitors treated as one)

[chavo]

Thanks for the info. Do u have any boards that holdso many cards? I was thinking 4 graphics cards would do 8 monitors as each card has twin outputs.

3000 was for a mid range i7 and a 590 card. No screens or anything. Guy was a chancer.

[Pob255]

Like I said, do research don't assume you'll want 4 cards for 8 monitors.

Also consider how you can setup the monitors.
8 monitors seems a very odd number, a normal line up for 8 would be 2x4 which is going to put the middle of the screen at the intersection of two monitors which is not a good thing for a flight sim or games.


It looks like nvidia surround vision can only do 3 monitors max.
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/3d-vi...ements-uk.html

3000 was for a mid range i7 and a 590 card. No screens or anything. Guy was a chancer.

Sounds like it, probably cost half that with good components.

[chavo]

I have read that eyefinity can do 6 monitors on 1 graphics card.

my mate saw this video and wanted it!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3jpG3rv4zI

in relation to monitors i am thinking 22 or 24 inch screens, smallest possible screen surround to keep the images as close as possible. quite a difficult concept in reality.

[Pob255]

Yes eyefinity can support 6 monitors on one card, however for gaming one card is generally not enough for 3 high res monitors without dropping the settings let alone 6.

nice, my guess is they've got it set up as two separate setups, one 5x1 and a 2nd 3x1 or as a 3x2 and two single monitors
The way eyefinity works is it make multiple monitors act as one single big monitor at a driver level (ie windows only sees it as one really big very high res monitor)

One thing I would point out about that video is

AMD's next generation 7 Series chipset with 4 graphics cards running Microsoft's Flight Simulator on 8 monitors.

the HD7000 series cards are not out yet and it was using 4 of them (probably the top end cards)

EDIT: I must admit a multi-screen FSX setup is not going to be cheap, could well come to to £3000-4000, b ut boy that's going to be a fun build.

I'd point him at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsl9-xkA2v0 as personally I think 5x1 in portrate is a very nice setup
Here's another 5x1 portrait setup (not FSX) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yvakLCwbz4