Quick update, I settled on 24 being the magic number, 4 being considered as backups. I managed to get 24 brand new IBM NETVISTA 6648 motherboards, which are 815 chipset boards, so no more VIA as an option. I also have another 7, Intel 815 boards which I will probably use to build systems to sell, to recover some of the investment. I got 31 3Coms 905Bs, that I managed to get to work after assigning exclusive IRQs on their PCI slots; I got 31 Sound Blaster Live's CT4780 and managed to get them to work. Kudos to "boxpressed", that uploaded here the only working drivers on the web (https://archive.org/details/sblive-1024). I got 10 PIII 1000 SL4C8s and will get the rest pretty soon; I got 31 brand new coolers; Settled on Wise keyboards and got 10 - they feel and sound perfect; As mice I went with the Perixx 10442 PS2 with 1000 DPI and got 10. I want to start designing the enclosures/cases, which will be see through and mounted on the desk above the monitors.

Not sure if any games of the time supported that many people. Quake 3 and Unreal for example had a max of 16 players and the majority only had 8.
Just something to keep in mind as of course nothing stopping you having multiple games going at once.

Will be interesting to see the cases, didn't realise you weren't just using some generic case. Gives you the opportunity to design something that's easy to service.

I honestly wish you luck with all this!

Hi! I've recently decided to upgrade to Pentium 4 machines and I got 20 MSI Medion MD8080 boards with 2.8 Ghz Northwood 800 FSB CPUs, just to be sure I would have more juice to run FPS games more fluid. But I encountered a big problem with the P1130 Dell monitors. The anti glare coating is scratched. I don't know if these monitors have the anti glare film, or are they dip coated, because, from my understanding, dip or sprayed coated ones are harder to buff out. I went this route because of the access I had to buy these monitors, but now I am not so sure about the project, because of this. Removing the film from 20 monitors is a lot of work, but buffing out the coating is orders of magnitude harder and time consuming. Does anyone know what type are these, or do I have to open one to find out? I could not find any solid info on them. Thanks!