I caved in to

.. building my own system. I spent 3-4 hours putting together the whole thing in a free-after-rebate Ultra Wizard case and Ultra PSU, only to find out that the (brand new) 7-year-old PSU wasn’t really working… great. So I put it into the Antec Sonata III + EarthWatts 500W PSU (not that I care about saving power at work…)

I’m using the ECS NForce4M-A v3.0 with AMD X2 6000+. There’s 3 PCI slots and I got 3 PCI 8400GS. Fry’s also has a PCI-E 8400GS for $15 AR this week so I plan to get that too for 8 possible outputs all with the same GPU.

But when I put all 3 cards in, the motherboard would show the GPU “BIOS” screen and reboot over and over. Not really sure why.. then I put my PCI-E 7600gt in place of a 3rd PCI card and it still happened. Shuffled the cards around and it still happened… sigh. That ruins my plans for 3-4 cards on this board, but maybe I can fix it with a BIOS update or something.

Installed 9.10 i386 (oops, 8gb ram and only 2gb usable) with / on a 40gb drive and /home on a 500gb one. The 500gb was coming up as /dev/sda so I had to be a bit careful as to where the MBR was getting installed and stuff. When 10.04 comes I’ll remember to install amd64.

The machine runs seti@home too, but it looks like the stock HSF does not run too well with it. Going around 72C with the case fans on low; I set them to high before leaving the office and it dropped to about 65C. I’ll change the HSF later. Ubuntu 10.04 is coming out in about a month and I might take it home to upgrade. The machine that the company gave me (AMD XP 3000+) is running at 65C as well; now it’s just sitting with power and LAN connected (no keyboard/mouse/monitor/etc.)

4 displays is hard. Actually, just multiple heads is hard. Unless you’re willing to cave in to Xinerama…. NVidia TwinView supports graphics acceleration but only for 2 outputs on 1 card. I will be using Xinerama with all 4 displays for now. nvidia-settings supports configuring them all with Xinerama in a GUI. TwinView only supports 2 displays and “separate X screens” leads to a real disaster. It looks like you have different GNOME sessions for each X screen… yeah.

I have 2 Dell E178FPb and 1 Hyundai L70S, all VGA-only. The company gave me a Princeton 19″ DVI+VGA monitor which was a lot bigger than the rest, but I swapped it out with a Dell E176FPb in the lab (no one cares). So now I have 3 17″ Dells which all line up and this fat 17″ Hyundai (more like 현대 ;) .)