KermMartian wrote:
Kllrnohj, fair enough; I'm willing to take your advice on that. You quoted the 6950 at 118 Watts maximum - that was fully loaded with lots of monitors, not a single monitor, right? GPU first it is, then; I'll be interested to see how it works out.
6950 is ~180w under max load (peak power draw). It idles at 11w with a single monitor - figure idle with lots of monitors somewhere in between (iirc it would be somewhere around ~30-40w idle)
When I get home I'll quote the power draw of my rig, which is an i7 920 OC'd to 3.6ghz, 3 monitors, a 5870, 4 harddrive + 1 ssd. It is much less than you might think 
Excellent, I like the idea of low power usage. From what I've read, it seems the i7s are quite efficient idling at low load?
Very. In my machine the multiplier will get as low as 9, putting the CPU at about 1.35 GHz, while it scales up to 22 at maximum demand (and even further on individual cores with 'turbo boost').
Less obvious are the architectural tweaks allowing it to turn off parts of the core that aren't in use, but yes; they tend to be quite efficient.
Tari wrote:
Very. In my machine the multiplier will get as low as 9, putting the CPU at about 1.35 GHz, while it scales up to 22 at maximum demand (and even further on individual cores with 'turbo boost').
Less obvious are the architectural tweaks allowing it to turn off parts of the core that aren't in use, but yes; they tend to be quite efficient.
Excellent, I am very happy to hear that. 
Also, in case anyone is interested in some more mockups, based on quadrants 3 and 4 of the OP:
Loose the gaps between the monitors and I could see both being good, but watching movies and similar on either of those setups would be a pain. Over all I see the first being better for many things, the full widescreen in the middle would allow you to use areosnap more effectively and for watching youtube videos and such.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well. If the bottom middle one was the primary, I could, for example, have a movie running on the top-middle monitor, documentation and code on the two side monitors, and compiler and execution on the bottom one.
Sounds like fun to me.
KermMartian wrote:
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well. If the bottom middle one was the primary, I could, for example, have a movie running on the top-middle monitor, documentation and code on the two side monitors, and compiler and execution on the bottom one.
Sounds like fun to me.
I think I just peed a little 
Thanks DShiznit, that's what I go for with my builds.
And thanks to Kllrnohj for the excellent recommendations!
OH make sure you run
this multi-monitor screensaver at least once...
DShiznit wrote:
You're the second person to say that. I actually run this awesome multi-monitor screensaver now that looks amazing spread across my four monitors; I'll have to check the name of it when I am back at home.
Kllrnohj wrote:
When I get home I'll quote the power draw of my rig, which is an i7 920 OC'd to 3.6ghz, 3 monitors, a 5870, 4 harddrive + 1 ssd. It is much less than you might think
This draws about 230w while idle from the wall. Turning on my 3 24" IPS monitors (CCFL back light - not the most efficient) bumps that up to 420w from the wall while idle. Oh, and this is with speed step *disabled* (generally recommended to disable that when CPU overclocking).
Firing up a decent load (~50% CPU usage + 100% GPU usage), basically what you'd get from a demanding game, bumps that up to 630w from the wall (including the 3 monitors - so figure computer load went from ~230w to ~440w). Most of that increase is from the GPU, seeing as I don't let the CPU downclock itself
Fascinating, that's good to know. Those are numbers that I can probably life with.
Thanks for checking; out of curiosity, what do you use to check?
KermMartian wrote:
Fascinating, that's good to know. Those are numbers that I can probably life with.
Thanks for checking; out of curiosity, what do you use to check?
The UPS I have has an LCD display on it that shows various info, including the current load. But you could also use a Kill A Watt http://www.amazon.com/P3-International-P4400-Electricity-Monitor/dp/B00009MDBU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1302239829&sr=8-2
Very nice, good to know! Do you really need all three monitors to be running on the UPS, though? That seems like it would be an unnecessary drain should the power go out, but that's not really the point, I guess.
KermMartian wrote:
Very nice, good to know! Do you really need all three monitors to be running on the UPS, though? That seems like it would be an unnecessary drain should the power go out, but that's not really the point, I guess.
They aren't all hooked up to battery backup on the UPS. The UPS has two sets of outlets, one set has battery backup, one has surge only.
That said, the UPS is just so I can cleanly shutdown if the power goes out (and for the power filtering and brown-out protection, of course), it doesn't need to last very long.
Indeed, that makes sense. I realized that my summer vacation actually starts in about a month (!!!!), so I'll probably get started with ordering the GPU sooner rather than later.
*bump* So I checked my case, and the three-slot (!!) 6950 will indeed fit. I still like the idea of the 2GB, 6-output 9650 (it does Eyefinity, right?) and even though NewEgg doesn't have it in stock, Directron does, and they've been decent in the past. Is this correct?
2x-4x
http://www.directron.com/b087b005b.html
1x
http://directron.com/6950dcii2d2gd5.html
KermMartian wrote:
Yup, looks good.
All ATI cards do Eyefinity.
To confirm exactly what that means, if I were to create a jigsaw puzzle of monitors fitting roughly into a square, Eyefinity would let me play a game on that jigsaw as if it was one big monitor, assuming I explained the geometry to it?
KermMartian wrote:
To confirm exactly what that means, if I were to create a jigsaw puzzle of monitors fitting roughly into a square, Eyefinity would let me play a game on that jigsaw as if it was one big monitor, assuming I explained the geometry to it?
No. Eyefinity only supports monitors either in a single row (landscape or portrait orientation) or in a 2-row 3-column grid. Oh, and you can't mix orientations either. It must be all landscape or all portrait (in the eyefinity group, I mean - other monitors can be whatever you want)
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