I stumbled into work one day and noticed that I had been given two monitors, originally I had thought pffft, what do I need two monitors for? I can work with one, till I started using two, now if you put me near a single monitor setup it’s like I have forgotten how to read and write, I’m stuck, I’m in and out of servers all the times but can never remember hostnames or IP addresses so its handy looking up on one side what I need applying it and the seeing on the other side where i need to be.
So, I did my usual and as soon as I got a bit of cash together threw a cheap and cheerful a two-monitor setup together at home and loved it.
I do a bit of amateur film making and was using the rig to edit video and sort through some pictures of the shoot.
We take part in a competeion every year called 48HFP, basically its making a film in 2 days, it's fun and stress at the same time.
This is old faithful with the matrix screen saver,
I was initially happy with the setup till someone said, you ever seen Call of duty on 3 monitors? Wha?? No way, is that even a thing?
So, for a long time I read up on it, I tend to wait and read and wait then read some more and still don’t want to commit, at one point I got a bit ambitious and thought hang on! Can’t I just hook up three monitors to the card I have?? It was an AMD Radeon 200 series, but have you ever had a card so generic you can’t find a model number? Well that’s the card I had. It did have two HDMI ports and VGA port, so there I was, dripping with as I like to call it, *install sweat rearranging the desk, moving stuff and every so often the wife would appear and ask what was i doing, I would mumble"stuff" distractedly and then try moving things another way.
( *"Install Sweat" The kind numbing fear that any time you ever touch your computer, just the mere act of touching it might break it, a condition of the mind and causes torrents of sweat, but not through physical exertion!)
(credit:giphy)
I tried it and failed, monitor three wouldn't show anything, so bought a couple of converters, won’t bore you with the details so suffice to say they didn’t work. I was gutted at the all the moving about of the PC and rearrangements that took ages knowing that was up for work early in the morning.
Then Nvidia did a cool thing and brought out the GTX range, I’ve looked at the 1080 Ti and it looks like stonkingly good card, all the news I heard at the time was that it was a game changer, but game changers are usually stupidly expensive, so I stopped and waited. Read reviews and then waited some more.
Eventually Nvidia released news about the GTX 1070 and GTX 1060, okay they didn't wait that long to announce, but in my world of impatience it seemed to last for eternity.
The GTX 1070 seemed like it might be a good compromise on price but didn’t seem too much of a difference in performance, the frame rate for what you were spending was pretty good, don’t get me wrong, it’s an expensive card and I have never spent that kind of cash on a GPU before, but DOOM came out and I heard great things about it and doom at 5760 * 1080, well I started to get the night whispers, come on, get it, get it, GET IT. That, and I whispered, it does VR. I have always liked VR as concept but never thought I would see a proper example of it in my lifetime, one that was cheap and worked well, closest I thought I would ever see it being realised was one of these,
I saved up, traded some stuff in at the local gameshop till I had enough for this bad boy.
The card itself is a bit of a long beast, and as much as I like building and maintaining my gaming rig and I do, I knew getting it in my case was going to be a stone cold install sweat nightmare, (see above for my definition of install sweat). I bought the card from a shop I always do business with, Creative Computing they are honest, don’t charge the earth and more often than not will bung in a freebie if you are a good customer, and that is awesome.
As part of the purchase they offered me a free fitting,
For anyone who hasn’t tried it, don’t fret, it works perfectly and gets the dust and rubbish out completely, I was wary at first, but shouldn't have been, the PC was fine after it.
SETUP
Okay, that's a wee bit misleading, the guys in the shop had obviously uninstalled the old drivers, taken the old card out, installed the new card and installed the new card drivers.
I've always found AMD GPU drivers a bit on the temperamental side, Nvidia's I have always liked, easy to install, no major hassles and sometimes some nice features thrown in.
The only setup I had was to re-arrange the desk and then plug the three monitors I had in to the GPU itself, no major hassles, but it took a while to get the cables hidden and tidy.
Open the Nvidia control panel, select my three displays,
Drag them round a wee bit,
and that was it.
As someone who likes multi monitor desktops it is very cool, and you do get a lot of space, its running at 5760*1080 on some 1080p monitors, they don’t run at 144hz sadly, that was a bit out of my budget for just now.
the leftmost monitor usually has Spotify
The middle monitor is for browsing and emails
and the right hand monitor is for good old Steemit
Initial Thoughts
MultiMonitor setups aren’t perfect, but from what I hear it’s a lot better than it used to be.
Icon placement can be a bit annoying, you have the desktop set the way you want, play a game and then come back to the desktop and they have all shunted to the left-hand monitor. Take my advice, Windows 10 is a pain for messing your icons up, use a freeware app called DeskLock, easily found on decent freeware sites and rids you of that problem.
When clicking on the start icon the menu comes up on the far left hand side, I would have preferred that all in the middle.
Some application windows will appear in weird places, but you can move them.
Some apps won’t maximise to the one screen you want left right or centre, so you have to leave them as windows and make them bigger, it’s a minor thing but it’s annoying. Adobe Photoshop is bad for that.
and so, to the games
This was me on my first game...
And I’ll tell you all about it in part two...