I have a large amount of old lcd monitors that have vga and dvi-d ports. Is there a way to run many of these in extended desktop like how a display port hub works?(cheep and ghetto is preferable)
In theory you could have a device that takes a 4k image and splits it to many monitors but I mainly found spliters that duplicate the same image.
There are some GPUs that support 6 Display ports out of the box. Search for Eyefinity on newegg.
What you could also do is something as suggested in this interesting thread: Click me for I am a link.
Graphics cards could be bought of ebay for 50-100 bucks. Something like the Quadro NVS 420 (although that needs a VHDCI to DVI splitter cable that runs around 40-60 bucks on ebay if it is not included in the deal). The quadro gives you 4x DVI. There are also Matrox Millennium P690 cards that are PCI (!!!) not PCIe meaning you could cheap out on the motherboard (something like a AM3+ 970A chipset has 2x PCIe x16 and 2 PCI). But the Matrox ones are around 70 bucks for the dual link (meaning one DVI outputs to 2 DVI via a splitter cable (mostly included in deals)).
I am unsure about how Video cards run in the same motherboard when they are not SLI'ed or Crossfire'd. That would have to be explored further.
Since a shedload of Monitors is pulling n*35 Watts or so the number of office surplus PC's driving them is not that big of a deal. You could get something like the ATI/AMD R5 Flex (passively cooled, 3 digital outputs, around 27 watts of power usage max and around 50 bucks) and dump them in 3 office PCs, totalling 9 displays plus the onboard video solution of the office PC's could be used. You can use one set of Mouse/Keyboard via Synergy, a tool that also enables file drag/drop sharing. You can throw your normal work machine also in the mix. Making that somewhere between 9 and 15 displays.
For mounting I would resort to Woodwork. Monitor arms are expensive. De-bezeling of the monitors is also an option for making the gap between the displays as small as possible. Although that calls for an advanced mounting solution.
Total resolution would give you something like 3k by 3,5k for 9 displays.
Thanks The NVS 420 Looks Like a cheap route. I saw some cheaper 4 way adapters on amazon.
Also saw Xdmx on that tread could then reuse a lot of old boxes and gpus.
Have to see how many gpus have multiple dvi ports.(adapters aren't cheap and add up fast)
Here's a list of 6x mini DP GPUs on newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007709%20600050352
I am by no means an expert on video walls or anything similar, but I believe you can daisy chain up to 3 (?) DP monitors off of a single DP connection. However, regardless of all this, you'd need some software to control all of this because I'm pretty sure Windows would not understand what was going on.
Edit: re-read your post. MIssed that the monitors dont have DP. My bad!
