Out of Pod Experience

Another reason to go with much less powerful (power hungry) cards for secondaries. If you are right, which I have no reason to doubt, then his original plan for Three GTX 680 was probably not attainable.

This is from PCI-SIG:
"Q: Does PCIe 3.0 enable greater power delivery to cards?
A: The PCIe Card Electromechanical (CEM) 3.0 specification consolidates all previous form factor power delivery specifications, including the 150W and the 300W specifications."
http://www.pcisig.com/news_room/faqs/pcie3.0_faq/#EQ15
Which does not really tell me anything, unless I dig deeper, which not something I am willing to do at this time.

I am not 100% sure what you mean, but I suspect you mean the IPS panel thing, and the following assumes that you did.

It's not really THAT expensive.
If you're willing to go down a little in size from the initially planned 24", you can find decent 23" FullHD IPS panel monitors starting at 170$ a piece. It's not like there's really such a huge difference in having a screen that's ~4% smaller in size, or is it ?
However, I would say that there IS a huge difference in having a screen that does not heavily distort colours as soon as your viewing angle goes even 30 degrees (or even less) from the perpendicular (or worse, even invert them at certain not very large angles) - because that's what happens to "traditional" TN panel monitors.
Is it really that "elitist" to NOT want to ever see stuff in weird tints or (partially) negative colours whenever you move a bit more around your workspace (or you know, in case you want to arrange your screens parallel to each-other as opposed to all pointing directly at your seat) ?


Slot power might borderline be an issue in some cases, however, you can probably find a PCI-E power connector on most GTX 650 cards for both such a type of situation and in case you want to overclock them. Either way, simply plugging in a power cable into each card's connector should solve the problem if it actually exists at all in the first place.

Slot speed is, frankly, overrated. Not meaningless, but overrated.
If all the textures are already loaded on the graphics card and don't need to be fetched from auxiliary buffers in standard working RAM (which in case of 2 GB cards and 3 EVE clients should seldom ever be an issue to begin with), the slot speed barely matters at all, something like at worst a 5% drop in average FPS.
Overall, even if those slots would run at just x4, and you'd actually need to keep fetching some non-negligible amount of textures and such due to slightly insufficient VRAM (like, say, in case of a huge fleet fight with all clients set on high detail), you'd still only lose maybe at most 20% of average FPS (probably much less) due to slot speed issues... but you would have already gained 40% to begin with, so you're still noticeably ahead with the 3 cheaper cards either way. And more importantly, you'd probably lose a lot more FPS due to insufficient CPU power in that particular situation, so it really doesn't even matter.
The type of scenario where slot speed matters a lot is when a lot of larger textures change quickly and repeatedly, something that most game designers try to avoid ever having in a game (that is, I can only name ONE game that does almost the opposite on purpose, and it's not EVE).

Elemental, I've always provided video cards with power straight from the power supply, with their own connectors. always, every time, of the past 12, 13 years. and yeah it would be better to have triple 660's, but don't break the bank over it. each will run two clients fine, so if you want to jump to 6 monitors in the future, you can, with two monitors on each card.

---

Akita, what's the response time on your IPS monitor? what would it be for an IPS that is around $170... 15 or higher, right? causing trails? I just don't see the cost justification of a reduced size, increased latency, and higher price monitor for the sake of its viewing angle, when my body remains still--and I'm going to stay in one spot for peripherals like my keyboard and mouse, and mousepad.

I have five TN panels, and they're each aimed at my eyeballs on the vertical and horizontal axis... and they have VGA, HDMI, and DVI inputs... and are 2ms latency... and samsung.

if I thought IPS was a good idea, I would be using them. I don't skimp on quality... so for something like a multi-monitor build, and OP and this thread... emphasizing IPS and making it sound important to OP or anyone else ... remains elitist, in my opinion.

TN is just... more cost effective. especially these refurbished samsung PX2370's. even at full retail they were at a cost/quality sweet spot, and they can be had for $100 off

the type of monitor you will see me go nuts over, are true RYB displays that will benefit my digital art... on a new computer, and the TN panels will remain