For months, I've had a spare 20" HP LCD-2065 display sitting under my desk at the office. With a few extra cycles on my hands, I decided to take half-a-day and setup a truly bad ass developers workstation: three, 20-inch monitors,
Xinerama'ed to produce a single 4800x1200 pixel desktop (each display driving 1600x1200 @ 60 Hz). And, best of all, the HP Z600 Workstation powering this monster is running 64-bit 10.04 Ubuntu Linux.
Not bad, eh?
Here's how I did it ...
My relatively bare bones HP Z600 Workstation shipped with a single mid-range
Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 PCIe card. This really isn't a bad graphics card, but if you have one of these and you expect to drive three displays with a single FX 1800, you should stop right there. Turns out, even though the Quadro FX 1800 offers three display outs (2
displayPorts and 1 DVI) the card will not let you use all three outs at once. At most, in any configuration, you'll be able to drive only two displays with the FX 1800: either using both displayPorts, or one displayPort and the DVI out.
So what if you want to drive 3-displays on a Z600? Well, you have two choices: get another Quadro FX 1800 and insert it into the 2nd PCIe x16 slot, or find another graphics card that's supported by the latest Nvidia driver. Lucky for me, I was able to get my hands on an extra Quadro FX 1800, popped it in, and bingo. Tri-monitor, biggest desktop I've ever used in my life, perfection. Not to mention the latest Nvidia drivers (
260.19.21 as of 12/2/10) work flawlessly with the FX 1800 on 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04.
I will note, however, that before I snagged an extra FX 1800, I tried pairing a single FX 1800 with an older Nvidia GeForce 5200 PCI. Configuring 3-monitors with an FX 1800 (only supported by the latest Nvidia driver) and the GeForce 5200 (supported by the legacy GPU Nvidia driver) failed miserably. It turns out, you really can't mix-and-match new and legacy hardware that use different driver versions (well, maybe you can, but I tried for an hour and gave up in disgust). In short, after my experiments here, it feels like you'll have better luck using two identical cards, instead of trying to mix-and-match random graphics hardware.
Good luck, and happy hacking!
