Multi-Mon of Doom
From Fozzee.net
On the DIY Datacenter page, I spend quite a bit of time discussing my server setup. While that's impressive to us geeks, most ordinary people really can't appreciate the fanciness of it. Enter my Multi-Mon Workstation of Doom! For those of you who aren't familiar, "MultiMon" is the Microsoft name for having multiple physical displays connected to a single workstation, acting as one large workspace.
I've been experimenting with MultiMon since the Pentium MMX / Windows 98 days, what with the multiple PCI video cards and heap-o-CRTs. My friend Aaron was even so cool as to have a (mostly) matching pair of flat-glass 17" Viewsonic monitors. The technology has come a long ways since then. On the right end of the Display Array is my 17" 4:3 Samsung LCD. I got this for Christmas from my dad, back in the day (when $300 for a name-brand 17" LCD was a FANTASTIC deal) and have used it on my workstation ever since. It replaced a 14" MAG Innovision LCD that I'd bought at Best Buy's Black Friday sale the year before, having camped out with Tim and company. The two 19" Samsungs are courtesy Becky and my parents, for my birthday. After I received those, I took the 17" to work, to spread the Joy of Multimon.
Subsequently, work bought me a second display (that matches the one they already owned for me), so my monitor returned home. After sitting on a shelf for a few days, I decided that I needed MORE. I located a GeForce2 MX (64mb, bought off Micah back in the day) and added it on. The latest ForceWare drivers make short work of managing multiple monitors on multiple interface cards. Things have improved exponentially since Windows 98.
The rest of the system is pretty bland, and frankly, pretty old. It's the slowest of my "new" machines, but it doesn't really need to be all that fast, as if I have something really processor-intensive to do, I'll run it on the VMWare node, and if I have something large to store, it's stored on the file server (soon to be one-and-the-same as the VMWare server). This PC really is just a workstation.
System Specs
- AMD Sempron 3100+ Paris (Socket 754)
- 1gb of RAM (more to be added, when I finish the VMware project, the old file server will surrender it's memory)
- 74gb WD Raptor 10,000rpm SATA hard drive.
- 2 GeForce-based video cards
- AGP GeForce FX 5600XT (128mb) with DVI and VGA interfaces
- PCI GeForce2 MX/200 (64mb)
- 3 Samsung Monitors
- 2 Samsung Syncmaster 940BW 19" Widescreen
- 1440x900 native resolution
- DVI and VGA, selectable interfaces
- 1 Samsung Syncmaster 174
- 1280x1024 native resolution
- VGA only
- 2 Samsung Syncmaster 940BW 19" Widescreen
- Ergonomic Microsoft Input Devices
