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It's this thing's fault, and I'm sticking by my story! You might remember a month or so ago, I came across an nVidia GeForce GTX 770 on the local Craigslist listed for $100 or so dollars. I offered $75, thinking that I'd be happy to pay $85/90 for it, but the guy took the offer. Who am I to look a gift-horse in the mouth (although I do teach about the Battle of Troy)! I installed it. It runs great and is way more video card than my the old Radeon HD 7850. And as I've said any number of times in the past, (being a non-gamer), I don't need much in the way of GPU power. However, it was a good opportunity and I took it.
While looking into what this card would do and my options for connecting my 4 monitors, I began to examine my current video interface set up. It's been awhile, so I'll walk through it for you to set a baseline. I have 4 monitors running as a standard. I've had at least 3 for some years going back to when we lived in Lubbock and worked in IT. It allowed my to keep an eye on how the servers were running while doing other things as well.
At the time, I was using an 17.3" SGI 1600SW LCD which was pretty exotic at the time. Yes: in fact it is the one, more accurately, the ones depicted being used by the Hugh Jackman "hacker" character in the 2001 movie Swordfish. It was my main monitor that worked with a couple of 19"/20" Apple Displays running Trinitron tubes on either side. For 2001-3, that was a pretty high-end setup. I sold and gave away that rig when we moved to the DFW area, but would rebuild it after picking up an unusual (normal for me) an Acer version of their Ferrari line F20 display.
Imagine this monitor, but with all the red parts being silver and no Ferrari badge (of course). I don't even think it was sold in the US. It was 20" and I used a number of other unremarkable panels on the side(s) for some time. As things progress, I started getting more picky with LCD panels and wanted to get into an IPS type screen.
That's when I picked this up, the IBM ThinkVision L200p. In it's day, it was "the big dog" of LCD monitors and was very expensive. When I bought it, it was out-of-date and just being pushed out the door. I actually picked it up locally for $13! The guy advertised it on CL as a 17" and I thought it would go on the side of the 20" Acer quite well. But, once I got a taste of using this IPS panel, the Acer found itself being sold!
Then I found one of these, an ThinkVision L220x for about $100 shipped. It uses an S-PVA panel and is fantastic. Just as sharp as the L200p, but brighter. Not very long later, I found another one on Craigslist for $50 and jumped all over it.
That's when I progress from the above setup with, 1 L220x, 1 L200p, and a 19" Westinghouse TV to 2 L220x, replacing the tv with 2 19" L1940pwd panels. Oh yeah, that little display you see on the lower left was my ThinkPad Tablet connected via USB and used as a touch display. I rarely used it this way, but just wanted to see if it would work. So that's been the state of affairs with the display end of my computing rig for quite some time. I ran 2 Radeon graphics cards to drive these 4 displays and was quite happy. Right up until that trouble-maker GTX 770 came along and started me thinking!
Well..... that's actually, not quite right. I was playing around with the GTX 750 Ti that I had upgraded my son's gaming PC to when I decided to see if it would drive the 55" Sony TV at it's native 4K resolution. Whattayaknow! It did it! I wouldn't play games that way, but it worked. This started me thinking..... if that thing will do 4K, what about that new GTX 770?
You know; that thinking business can get you into some trouble.... I started looking into 4K computer monitors and even looking at 4K TVs as computer monitors. What I found was that the small (24") ones made everything so tiny at 3840 x 2160 that you couldn't see a darned thing. Although, the new inexpensive 27"/28" panels had come out, they were still $700 or so! Looking at used ones, I found that the big boys (Dell, HP, Lenovo) had, had some out for a few years and they could be found used, but still in the $400+ range, until I stumbled onto this:
A ThinkVision Pro2840m, 28" TN panel. Yes, it's NOT IPS, but those guys are still well over $1000, so no $1K for 4K for me. There was one on eBay that was listed at about $200 with a "best offer", so I offered $150. Oh, by the way, the guy said that it displayed the image as a tiny little thing at the top and it would go into "power save" mode and not come out. I suspected that issue to be user error with a GPU that wouldn't support the resolution or a cable that wasn't DP1.2 compliant. He came back to me at $165, but I never could get him to tell me how they tested it; so I let it pass. The following week, I saw it listed again, but this time at $150. I was busy getting ready and then going off to Washing DC on our family Spring Break trip, so I didn't do anything about it then either. When I came back, that monitor was again relisted, but this time at $126 (including shipping). I figured, "what the heck", I could risk it!
The box arrived yesterday. In between running errands and going to look for an new car (I'll discuss this later), I connected it. It detected and ran all on it's very own. I set it up with the 20" L200p on the right, and the 2 22" L220x on the left and ran it for several hours during which, it was amazing to have that amount of real estate (3840 x 2160, 1920 x 1200, 1920 x 1200, 1600 x 1200)! It is showing some issues with going into power save and not coming out, but I think that can be resolved, on top of which, I believe it's still under warranty.
Some of you may remember the Pinncacle Stream-Genie "portable" computer that I scored a few months ago. This machine is one of the oddities of the computing world variously called "lunchbox", "luggables", or maybe even "portable desktops". They are essentially a bunch of desktop-spec components put into a semi-custom (they don't sell very many of them) case designed for specific functions. Their work tended toward the esoteric; ranging from "port-sniffing", to weapon control for the military. As notebook computers have become increasingly powerful, their already small market share has gotten even smaller! So, they are rare with a capital "R"! However, they are interesting though. A lot of which has to do with the fact that they use largely "off-the-shelf" desktop components.
So much so, that when you pull all this stuff out of the box, you end up with the inside of an ATX case. OK; granted that you have an LCD attached to the "bottom" of it, and that it's a really small case! However, it's never-the-less, still a full-sized ATX case.
On one side, you have mounting for an ATX pattern power supply and a full, 7 expansion slots.
On the other side, are drive cages for normal 3.5" and 5.25" drives; 2 of each. There is also an area for an intake fan covered by a grill.
.... and on the other side of the "floor" past the 15" LCD is a fold-out keyboard, complete with a touchpad. This connects via a pass-through to the back where there's a double PS/2 connector for the motherboard's I/O panel. The LCD display has the same arrangement in the form of the familiar HD15 "VGA" connector that you can see in the first side image above.
So, it took me a little while to get all this out of there! This machine was a highly specialized, extremely expensive tool used for onsite video streaming back when processors weren't powerful enough to do the work via software, so there were several expansion cards with LOTS of chips on them to do this work in "hardware". This was quite a computer in it's day! What am I planing to do with it?
I'm thinking maybe a portable gaming machine! What!?! Yes, I'm aware that I'm not much of a gamer..... well, actually, I'm not any kind of a gamer, but still..... it's really a cool idea if you think about it! So, here's the plan:
- Install a motherboard capable of taking a modern enough chip that can run real (non-Minecraft) games.
- Move the power supply from above the I/O area which is coincidentally where the CPU and it's heatsink/cooler sits to the other side of the case. The drive side of the case has an area for a fan that's a perfect fit for SFX sized PSU.
- Replace all the drives with modules that will allow me the greatest amount of flexibility. Icy Dock makes some nice ones.
- Install a recent, but cool-running graphics card such as the nVidia GTX 750 that would be capable of running modern games at playable fps.
Although this "works-in-progress" project will end up being a blog series as I acquire parts for it, I am OK to show you this since I bought it already. It's the Gigabyte H81M-S2PV LGA-1150 Micro-ATX motherboard that I recently picked up off of the local Craigs List for $35. Many of you will recognize that although, it's the new mainstream CPU socket, the H81 will indicate that it's the "low-end" chipset, incapable of the finer points of gaming hardware such as over-clocking. There are a few other cheap-o features as well, such as 2 RAM sockets, only 4 SATA ports of which only 2 are 6Gbp/s, and not even an internal USB 3.0 header! AND what's with the 2 PCI expansion slots vs. only 2 PCI-e expansion slots (only one of which is 16x)! But really! How much do you figure I'll try to cram into this thing anyway!
OK..... let's start with this.... it's I/O panel. While you're looking at the fact that there's only 2 USB 3.0 ports on it, you might have missed that there 2 PS/2 ports. Yup, that particular feature is scarce as hen's teeth dating back to the LGA1155/56 boards, but on a board for a Haswell CPU!?! Perfect for my situation though since I have that passthrough for the attached KB/Mouse! Although the case will take a full-sized ATX board, it's still pretty tight in there, so the compact Micro-ATX 9.6" x 7.1" board will give me a little breathing room in there! Yes, I know that it doesn't have much in the way of features, but I'm not looking to make this into an every day user or ultimate "fragger". The idea of this machine is so that it's capable of doing mainstream gaming on a portable platform, not to make it the best thing ever! I am excited though. Roughly, I'll install a decent sized SSD to run the OS, and eventually a video card that won't embarrass itself, but I'm not going to stuff it full of gear that I won't use or need in a rig like this. Stay tuned. This is liable to get interesting!
