I have used a P4 with ddr ram and hyperthreading on linux. I was playing 4 high-quality video sequences of 512x576 and rocking audio. The main bottleneck was harddisk speed! if you need a lot of data I'd use multiple harddisk, or, even better, a motherboard with hardware array.

I was using a ati radeon dualhead. You are not using the gpu -- ? matrox g200 is not very fast. The reason for the strange video scale was that I was in fact projecting on 4 screens at the time, splitting the beam in half and using the vertical distortion to stretch the image back again.

0
/\
\/
0

where o is projector and tnhe / was a diamond shaped 'screen'

You can also perfectly do with one dualhead graphics card and 2 pci graphics card. Since you're res is so low you could even just use video (?) resolutions and sync convertors? I have been using a tseng labs 6200 and S3Virge cards together w matrox dualhead cards to make a 2x2 videowall from old pc's and tv's ( does the beamer have a sub9 connector ? )

At the time athlon 64 was more expensive then lower class P4 hyperthreading. If you look at the specs, you'll see that giving money for good ddr dual channel ram is more interesting then simple cpu power. Hyperthreading also works great under linux - you have the 'feeling' of a dual processor system. 'normal' Athlon is a lot slower then P4 omho - I'm looking for more then 20% price drop if I see a more then 20 % performance drop and this is not the case.

Of course I'm now talking about power you need for video ( either generating or playback?) in high quality. limiting to one pc can save you headaches and might be cheaper at this time - unlike a few years ago when bying a couple of duron's was a good cheap option.

that's my 2 cents.

Georg Holzmann wrote:

Hallo list!

I have to use 4 800x600 projectors with 4 channel sound for an installation, so I wanted to ask if someone can share some experiences which hardware we should buy ...

the organizers suggested the following: athlon64, 1.8ghz 1gb ram 2x matrox g200 dualhead pci. (1 or 2 computers)

1. Should I really try to use the 64 bit processors :) (on linux of

course) ?

2. I think I will use GEM (it's not much to do - I have to display some

images and text ...), so I am just thinking about, how to use 4 projectors:

• I could use 2 computer with a dualhead graphic card, then make a big

GEM window over all 2 heads

• 1 computer with 2 dualhead graphic cards and make a big GEM window

over all 4 heads ?

• or maybe start 2 PDs on one computer to have 2 gemwins (trying to

avoid the experimtental multiple gemwin feature ...)

3. matrox g200: has anyone experiences with that card - I searched

google and found an (old) article, there it was said, that it's not possible to use DRI with 2 screens on linux ... or could someone suggest an other card?

Thanks a lot for any suggestion, LG Georg