OT: one huge monitor or 2 smaller or bigger ones ?

[Andrew Haley]

On 04/01/2011 06:44 PM, Linuxguy123 wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-04-01 at 17:38 +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
>> On 04/01/2011 05:16 PM, Linuxguy123 wrote:
>>
>>> e) Upgrade to 1 30 inch monitor, like the Dell U3011.  [2]560x1600, cost
>>> $1300)
>>
>> That's what I do.  Good for photo editing too.
>>
>> Whatever you choose, make sure it's an IPS monitor.
> 
> OK.
> 
>>> How does one find out the pixel limit of a video card ?
>>
>> The DVI interface maxes out at 2098 × 1311.  To do better than that,
>> i.e. to drive the Big Dell, you need a "dual link DVI" video card.
> 
> I had no idea about that.  Thanks for sharing.  How does this limitation
> come about ?

It's the DVI clock speed, which is limited to a maximum pixel clock
frequency of 165 MHz.  This works out at 2.75 megapixels at 60 Hz.

> My current machine has a HDMI port and a VGA port... 

You can get dual link HDMI.  It all gets a bit complicated because
HDMI 1.3 allows 340 MHz, so in theory a single HDMI link should be
able to drive that Big Dell -- but I wouldn't bet the farm on it
unless I'd made very sure that both ends support such a high clock
speed.  The Dell web page doesn't say.

Andrew.