This was a test setup to show potential buyers that all five of the outputs of a graphics card were working. The card had some damage so there was a doubt. @@tech.monk generously offered to buy the card at my asking price which helped me out of an emi hole (nevermind that I’m in another emi hole right now ha).
At the time, only the 3x 32" monitors were permanently connected, I brought in the other monitors for testing from other systems. The 4th monitor is actually a TV, it’s now setup somewhere else for my mother to watch KBC.
My main desktop is a M1 Mac mini, it has two display outputs, so I use a Dell D3100 display dock to drive the third 32" as well as another smaller monitor, for a total of 4 currently. The display dock uses DisplayLink to drive a monitor on the USB bus and this model can drive up to three monitors. Because bandwidth over USB is finite, you’ll need to consult the manual for these kind docks to see what combination of resolutions is possible.
As best as I can remember, this D3100 is the last or only model by Dell that supports three displays from a type A port. Everything else supports just two displays per type A USB 3.0 port.
The newer ones need a Type-C port but can drive three 4K displays each, this is for the D6000:
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But you can add as many of these as you want. Ideally, you’d want each of them to be connected to a separate USB controller. The video is compressed before sending over USB so you’ll need a decent processor. On my M1, the driver uses around 20% CPU while playing video and under 10% for browsing on that third display:
That part was easy, I have set up Proxmox to log directly to InfluxDB, so I have Grafana dashboards that pull in data from InfluxDB and generate graphs. All of that is a secondary monitoring system — I receive alerts through Telegram on my phone through a bot I’ve integrated since these days I’m not on my desktop as much as I would like to be.
It looks like all of the current models that are 4K and 43" are hybrid displays, marketed to people who want both a monitor and a TV, so they’re all glossy. The models I had short listed are difficult to find in stock, I remember the LG one being the 43UN700. Older revisions of the Dell sometimes end up at refurbishers on OLX, they sell them for around 40K each.