minimum hardware requirements for triple 24" monitor

Palindroman · Post by **Palindroman** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 5:30 am

With the advice from several people in the System Advice subforum I've come up with a configuration for a client of mine who wants a low power system that drives three 24" monitors:

Antec Minuet 350
picoPSU-120 with 80W AC Adapter or 80+ PSU from Minuet
Gigabyte GA-M69GM-S2H or if available GA-M78GM-S2H
AMD X2 4000+
Arctic Freezer 64 Low Profile
2 x 1024 MB Kingston ValueRAM, PC5300, 667 MHz
40GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K100
Sapphire HD3470 or Club3D HD3650, PCI-Express, 2xDVI
Silverstone RC01 PCI-e riser card
Microsoft Windows XP Professional

These monitors will be standing in the entrance hall of the company showing all kinds of visualisations. They'll be using Flash Player for these visualisations. I don't know exactly what kind of visualisations we're talking about (tehy don't know themselves yet), but I guess it's corporate movies, weather reports, time, schedules, news etc.

At first they wanted to use a Matrox Millennium P690 Plus LP 256 MB (which is pretty low power) but I told them it would probably not perform well enough for what they wanted. In the topic I mentioned several people advised me to look into ATI's Hybrid Graphic technology, notably SurroundView. I could combine the IGP of a 690G/780G chipset with an HD3470 (690G) or even HD3650 (780G) and thus have exactly the three DVI-ports required for the whole setup. From a power consumption POV this looks very promising.

However, the big question is: will this configuration perform well enough to run those Flash Player visualisations smoothly?

Thanks for advising.

autoboy · Post by **autoboy** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 8:26 am

Will the videos be in HD?

Palindroman · Post by **Palindroman** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 9:00 am

autoboy wrote:Will the videos be in HD?

I have no idea. It's just an audiovisual message board for employees and guests, I guess. One wouldn't think those video's have to be in HD as there will be several of them.

Palindroman · Post by **Palindroman** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 1:55 am

I made a mistake. The visualisations I spoke about will be 2D only, not 3D. They will be using Flash Player for a visualisation that is maximised and should stretch over all three screens.

Anyone has a clue as to whether my proposed combination of 780G/HD3470 will be able to deliver enough performance for this?

xan_user · Post by **xan_user** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 9:53 am

You may want to find out what resolution you will be running at. If its just a simple flash graphic then high res might be unnecessary.
Flash usually looks fine in analog so anything higher than xvga seems like overkill. Have you seen the flash display running yet?
I'm fairly sure running a pico 120 watt with a 80 watt brick will only produce around 80 watts.. and will probably kill the brick..
This is just a guess as the only pico's i played with had matching wattage bricks...
If I were trying this I would get everything running with a "normal" psu and then try it with a pico.

Waiting to see how this turns out. We expect a full article...

Palindroman · Post by **Palindroman** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 10:54 am

xan_user wrote:You may want to find out what resolution you will be running at. If its just a simple flash graphic then high res might be unnecessary.
Flash usually looks fine in analog so anything higher than xvga seems like overkill. Have you seen the flash display running yet?

The resolution of the 24" screens is 1920x1200 I believe.

I'm fairly sure running a pico 120 watt with a 80 watt brick will only produce around 80 watts.. and will probably kill the brick..
This is just a guess as the only pico's i played with had matching wattage bricks...
If I were trying this I would get everything running with a "normal" psu and then try it with a pico.

That's exactly what I'll do, though I have a feeling the picoPSU might just do the trick. It all depends on the 780G (which should be lower power than the 690G) and the HD3470 (which shouldn't consume more than 25 watts at load).

Waiting to see how this turns out. We expect a full article...

I'll give MikeC a call.

No, seriously. If it all goes through I'll be sure to report.