8 monitor PC question!

[Kaynin]

Greets! I've been out of the loop for a few months due to work, now I'm thinking of getting back into the scene.

I found this baby:

http://asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=653&l4=0&model=2182&modelmenu=2

Apparantly it can support up to 4 graphic cards all at PCIe 16x speed, and thus theoretically up to 8 individual monitors. My question is, can 8Gb DDR3 and a quad CPU handle this kind of power? Or should I go for a 1600FSB core2extreme cpu with faster DDR3 (currently have a Q6600 with DDR3 1333Mhz).

I rather not buy something like this only to find out it's not what I expected. Any ideas or advice?

[-silencer-]

Many boards have more physical PCI-x16 slots than PCI-x16 electrical capable slots. This board mentions 3-way SLI at full x16 mode, but I highly doubt that 4th slot is a true x16 connection. It may hold a 4th videocard, but I'd bet performance would be at a x4 or x1 connection. Do you understand what sort of power supply you'll need for 4x powerful videocards, a quad, and 4 sticks of ram?

I like the fact that it's got a 2nd RAID controller for SAS..

Honestly, do yourself a favor.. don't consider 4 videocards in one machine with 8 monitors. I thought how "cool" it would be a few years ago, but it's much more *useful* to just have multiple computers. Do what we do at work.. get 2-3 machines with 2 monitors on each machine. Using Synergy, it's as if they're all one machine - one mouse & keyboard, only they don't have the sort of bandwidth bottlenecks you may run into trying to do all that on one box.

[Xzin]

Once I get my 3x electrical, quad core rig up again, I could test and see how well that goes :) Might be another 2 or 3 weeks though.

[Kaynin]

Once I get my 3x electrical, quad core rig up again, I could test and see how well that goes :) Might be another 2 or 3 weeks though.

Would be interested in hearing how that goes then when the time comes. :P

[Xzin]

I never bothered to run anything full screen with the 3x 8800 GTX cards. I had the extra machines so I can 1 WoW per physical machine as I only run hardware only but I would imagine it could handle 3x without any problems (meaning very playable). Probably 4 if it had an extra x16 slot (which some new motherboards DO have).

[Shogun]

No idea if/how this would apply in this case, I have 2 cards with 4 monitors in my current rig, although currently using just 3 screens.

You can run 3d aps (games etc) on the 2 screens on the main gfx card without issues, but throw WoW or something else on one of the other 2 screens and you get a massive performance drop, I'd only ever planned to use the 2 screens on the main gfx card for 3d apps etc as I'd read about this in advance, but I have no idea how it'd affect the kind of setup you're talking about...

Unless someone has endevoured to resolve this issue lately? :)