Widescreen Gaming Forum

I am setting up a 5x1-P with a 6th display below the 5 in portrait. This is a productivity setup but once I had 3 panels setup I realized my aging workstation needed to be upgraded.

This will be mostly office work with some light 4k video editiing mostly from a GoPro.

I was thinking about a AMD FirePro W600 2GB Video Card.

I think I read that this can handle the 5x1-P but the 6th monitor always seems to be above the 5 in portrait. I would like my 5x1-P at eye level when standing & the 6th display at eye level when sitting.
5 displays will start off at 1080p but then move up to 2k or 4k eventually. The 6th display will be 4k in landscape.

MB will be a Asus X99-E WS SSI CEB LGA2011-3 Motherboard with a Intel Xeon E5-1650 V3 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor.

Ram will be G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory

Boot drive will be a Plextor M6e 128GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive with a secondary Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive. Most projects will be saved on a Drobo 5N.

Am I on the right track?

As long as you can physically move your monitors around, w600 should serve you for most 2d work. Although I'm not sure it's going to be all that useful for 4k video editing. The gpu wont give you much of a boost for acceleration. It may even hinder you if you turn it on because your cpu is probably stronger for the task.

Edit: You can arrange your monitors logically however you want. Just note that in win7 the compositer is based on dx9, so the max resolution in any direction (on a single graphics card) will be 8125 if you want to keep aero on.

I have a setup with thatt is 7680x1600 and I have a 2560x1600 monitor up top. If windows messes up and puts them next to each other it becomes a total of 10240x1600 in which far exceeds the dx9 limit. This isn't an issue normally because the composite is usually 7680x3200, in which fits nicely within the 8125x8125 limit.

When I was running 5120x1920 setup next to it on a seperate card, I didn't have that issue. There must be a different compositer session for each gpu in the system. At least in win7.

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System Core: | Intel Core i5-2500K + ASUS P8Z68-V + 16GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333 MHz | Win7 x64 | MSI R7970 Lightning 3GB [1105/1400] |
Display: | 3 x Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP-HC @ 7680x1600 | Dell u3011 |

Thanks for the reply. I never considered half of those things. The system is still being built & has changed:

MB: X99A GODLIKE GAMING | MSI

RAM: Dominator® Platinum Series 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4 DRAM 3200MHz

OS: vSphere ESXi Bare-Metal Hypervisor which will be running Windows 10 running off of a 1TB PCIe SSD most of the time. The other VMs will not need to use all of the monitors.

Secondary Internal Drive will still be a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive. Most projects will be saved on a Drobo 5N over ethernet.

5x1P plus 1: ASUS PB287Q 28" The ASUS PB287Q 28" panels are budget 4k panels. They are 28" with a Height of only 14.9" which means I should be able to squeeze 5 of them onto a Mega stand in P. I likely will not be running them at anything more than ~2k or 1440 initially.

CPU & GPU: I am still deciding on the CPU & graphics cards so ANY SUGGESTIONS would be appreciated. I was considering the FirePro bc it was reasonably priced & listed as one of the cards that would support 5x1-P Plus 1. Would 2 of the SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon R9 Fury 100379NTOCSR 4GB 4096-Bit HBM PCI Express 3.0 x16 TRI-X OC (UEFI) Video Cards be a better choice?

Do any non-AMD cards support 5x1-P plus 1? I don't mind getting multiple cards if necessary.

Remember mostly productivity with some gopro 4K video editing.

So this workstation is finally built with the exception of the video cards.

I would like a video card that would allow me to use to the 6 panels independently most of the time but I would like to be able to use Eyefinity 6 occasionally.

I thought I had decided on 2 of the SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon R9 390X 8GB cards in crossfire. I was under the misimpression that I could connect 3 panels to each card. Then I realized that Eyefinity requires all panels to be connected to a single card. So if you want to use Eyefinity 6 with this card you would have to use a DisplayPort hub.

The problem is that I will have six panels. Five of them are 4k panels. If I use a DisplayPort hub, I would be limited to less than 1080p because of bandwidth limitations of the MST signal as follows:

RESOLUTION...................MAXIMUM # of DISPLAYS
1680 x 1050 (WSXGA)........5
1920 x 1080 (1080p)..........4
2560 x 1600 (WQXGA).......2
4k or 2k...............................1


What am I missing? Even with two high end R9 390x video cards in crossfire (or four for that matter), I would be unable to use Eyefinity on 6 panels at even 1080p, let alone 2k or 4k? If I forget about Eyefinity, I can connect six panels to the two cards without issue, but will have to give up using all the displays as a single large eyefinity display?

I found a card that seems like it is up to the task after reviewing the list of cards on the Cards that support Eyefinity 6 thread:
AMD Firepro W9100 16GB
There seems to be a just released 32GB version of the W9100 that is $100 less. Still alot more than I allowed for a card. Is this card going to be half this price in 12 mos?

Any more reasonably priced cards that support 5x1-P +1 4k@60Hz ?

I am finally starting to see the differences between Pro cards & Enthusiast cards. The AMD Firepro W9100 is a great card. 32GB of VRAM! Great for engineering/CAD. But currently over $2,500 and while it seems to be one of the only cards that can support six 4k displays, I believe in Eyefinity, but it will only do that at 30Hz according to this: http://www.fireprographics.com/ws/produ ... /index.asp