Monitor Setups

[JackBurton]

I've heard alot of talk about CPU, GPU's and motherboards upgrades but nothing about display setups and arrays, and FX layouts. Not that you realy need to upgrade a monitor. Its one of those things you dont need to upgrade most of the time. Like a Case or a Power Supply.

I currently have a 27" main monitor with a 19" monitor that my slaves live in. they both are are set up in the pretty much standard 5box 1 w/ 2x2, horizontal side by side configuration. Mirai's boxing video has led me to look for ways to improve my setup.

Why do i need to change my setup? The aspect ratio's on my current diplays are too different. isboxer included an improvement a few years ago that synced the mouse repeater even though aspect ratio's didnt match across clients. Although the game is defiantly playable with the current setup I would feel more comfortable with an improved monitor array.

MiRai
Watch out, if your Fermi card(s) [nVidia] is/are running multiple monitors at different resolutions, the card itself may be running at full load 24-7.

EVGA Forum
3 24" monitors takes up a LOT of real estate! I went from 3 24's to 3 23's and I think I would be happy with some 22's. IMO The problem is once your viewing gets beyond your peripheral vision you have just wasted the money. If I were to do it over again I would probably go with the smallest 1920x1080 with good specs that I could find. ASUS makes a 21.5" that is 1920x1080 with a 50 million:1 ratio with a 5ms refresh rate that I like. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16824236176

What do I want to do with this setup? I want 5 clients across 2 displays with a third display for web browsing and everything else. Have the toon im driving on in the center with the slaves on one of the sides on a Vertically positioned display. Can 4 clients sit 1x4 on a like that and still look decent? Of course I plan on having all toons on minimum settings unless its the toon im driving from.

I've shopped around both online and localy but I cant figure out what to get. I saw some Samsung monitors at my local Costco that scared me. Because apparently not all monitors have the standard VESA mounting system on the back of them. I've seen a nice BenQ product that include a pivot, height and tilt ajustment. Something like that allready in the box would be great. Multi Display mounts can be pretty expensive for some reason.

MiRai Last Years Thread
This is a picture of my old setup from about 15 months ago [3x 23" // 1x 22" (top)]. I'm in the middle of moving from Chicago
to Tennessee and currently in a 'temp' living quarters which brings me down to 1 monitor. I'm also putting together a new
system as well and in TN that 22" is going away for another identical 23". I'm going to keep those vertical monitors where
they are but mount the horizontal ones on top of each other to put them in a rectangle shape on my desk; looking up at that
22" on my old setup eventually began to bother my neck.

I would recommend monitors that have a native resolution of 1920x1080 in case you play WoW in full screen mode solo and
want to record with FRAPS, makes video editing and converting between 1080p and 720p all that much easier (just my
opinion). I'm sure 1900x1200 is a nice resolution as well, you lose a little bit of the horizontal space and gain some vertical
space, not a huge difference between the 2 choices I'm sure.

This quote is from a thread a year old. MiRai do you still have the same opinions now that GPU's Power has changed?

These are the displays I was thinking of buying. Which of the two would you get?

28" Hanns-G HZ281 1920 x 1200, VESA 100x100 3ms / This would be the mounting arm I would use - $370 (allready have one)
24" ASUS VW246H Glossy Black 2m 1920 x 1080 VESA 100x100 / This would be the mounting arm I would use $510

This quote will hold true until the new nVidia cards are released (different architecture)

Have any idea when Nvidia is releasing its next generation cards? Have any idea when Intel is releasing the Ivy Bridge chipsets? Think they will release them in Synergy? Express3 and all that? I've been reading some stuff recently that's made me reconsider upgrading right now.

russianhaxor Reddit
How badly do you need/want this rig?

Because its going to be obsolete relatively soon and you can probably get 20-30% better performance out of it if you wait a few months...
Hard Drives will get cheaper... and so will SSDs.
If you like this build, by all means build it. There's nothing wrong with it at all. I probably would've picked a different case, but that's generally a matter of asthetics than anything else.

Do you realy think it will be a considerable margin of improvement?

Extreme Tech ForumsThe difficulty of software optimization is a further reason why adding more CPU cores doesn’t help much. Game developers have made progress in using multi-core systems, but the rate of advance has been slow. Games like

Rage and Battlefield 3 — two high-profile titles that use multiple cores — both utilized new engines designed from the ground-up with multi-core scaling as a primary goal.

The bottom line is that its been easier for Intel and AMD to add cores than it is for software to take advantage of them. Seven years after the multi-core era began, it’s already morphing into something different.

ISboxer wiki
Note: Some Intel chips, such as the i7, will list having more CPU cores (logically) than they physically have. These extra CPU cores do not count as part of our recommendations as they cannot fully power a game instance and must be paired with a physical core

Lax
The way i7 cores work is 1,3,5,7 are physical (real) cores and 2,4,6,8 are logical (fake) cores. My understanding is that for optimal performance, each fake core should be paired up with its corresponding physical core. And you should never assign only a fake core.

With 5 WoW instances on my i7, here is what I set mine to:
Slot 1: 1,2
Slot 2: 3,4
Slot 3: 5,6
Slot 4: 7,8
Slot 5: 5,7 (this one is assigned 2 physical cores)

This has served me well and is what I recommend to other i7 users. Enjoy