EVE General Discussion

I take it you are not too big on outdoor activities.

Tyke Supply (Florida?) sells inexpensive but well made free-standing, bolt-to-desk, and wall-mount monitor stands. I have 2 of their 3-panel free-standing stands that support up to 27" monitors, and they also make 6-panel (Hex) ones.

I've always wanted a geekosphere that looks like the control room of a hovercraft from The Matrix.

Alas things always end up that way in the end.

Get a sturdy desk and take 2 away from this. The stands are here.

Better suggestion, go out and smell the fresh air once in while. Go for a walk or ride a bike. Go to a movie, oops scratch that, the quality of movies these days......

^ seems like it would be too much for me, although I would love a 3 monitor set up. 2 monitors for the game, and one for external resources like Mumble, dotlan, EFT and Evemon. Middle one would be ship, right would be overview, D-Scan, Local, Fleet, watchlist, etc, and the left one would be all the other stuff.

I have this exact setup and let me tell you, it is everything I dreamed it would be. (And, no people, I will not go outside. The light, it burns!) I work from home quite a lot and I play various games. In both of those activities I like to have a lot of information available at a quick glance and the "ZOMG Lot's O' Monitors" setup really works well for me.

When playing EVE I usually have my "main" client running on the lower middle and right screens. You can shift the camera centering over in the client settings so that my ship is centered up on the middle monitor. I can keep this screen fairly clear to enjoy the beautiful graphics of EVE and just have the ship controls, targets, drones and watch-list on this monitor. The right monitor contains a nice wide overview, local, dscan, chat, etc. If I'm using a second character for scouting or scanning or whatever that goes on the bottom left screen. I've also used a single client on all 3 screens of the bottom row ... but that's almost too much screen for one client. I don't know what to do with all the space. My top left monitor is usually devoted to a browser (mostly for dotlan maps and to quickly look stuff up.) My top middle monitor is all my "status" type stuff. System monitoring, teamspeak, chat, itunes mini-player, world clocks, etc. That's also the monitor I keep my windows task bar on. Top right monitor is usually for some kind of online media. I'm always watching live-streams or television shows or something while I'm gaming and that stuff goes up there. With other games (FPS usually, this setup was not designed specifically for EVE) I will generally use the bottom three screens as one game screen and the top row for basically the same stuff I described above. It's nice to have a screen with a map always visible when playing something like DayZ.

Getting all this working required some planning. My first consideration was what video card setup I was going to use to drive this monstrosity. In my opinion, if you're going for more than three monitors, eyefinity (AMD cards) is the way to go. I have always been an nvidia guy but the eyefinity stuff seems to give a lot more options for multi-monitor setups. (I would advise you to do some research here if you haven't already.) I also wanted to be able to do crossfire or SLI so I really wanted to be able to have all six outputs on one card. This was about a year ago so I'm not sure if there are more options now but when I was looking there were only a couple of cards on the market with that many outputs. I went with two MSI Lightning 7970s. That card has two DVI and 4 displayport outputs on a single card.

My next consideration was screens. I decided on six Dell U2412M 24" screens. These are IPS screens, so the viewing angle on them is very nice, they're not too horribly expensive and the bezels are solid black and not that wide. They also have both DVI and displayport connections.

And now for the part you were really asking about: how to mount them. I initially went with an atdec hex-screen freestanding montior stand. This was quite a stand. It must weigh 60 pounds and appears to be made out of surplus tank parts. The horizontal supports are curved so that the monitors all face inward towards where the operator is sitting. I wanted to put this in the corner of a U shaped desk configuration and the curve wasn't quite curved enough for this to work out. I ended up with the monitors way to far from the back of the desk. I wanted to be able to push the whole setup back into the corner a bit more and the amount of curve is not adjustable. Other than that this was a beautiful stand. And if my house was to be demolished in some kind of huge explosion I have no doubt that monitor stand would have been standing, fully intact, exactly where it was afterward. But I had to send it back, much to the chagrin of my UPS guy. I replaced it with three of these from the same manufacturer. This takes up a bit more desk space but allows me to adjust the angle of the monitors however I want.

And in case anyone is wondering this all sits on top of some Ikea "Galant" desks which are fantastic. I got the wire managament baskets that hand under the desk and not a single cable touches the floor anywhere. If you want to keep the cabling coming from the monitors clean I would suggest looking for some 1" split loom tubing (google it) and a bulk pack of those velcro wire ties.

one more word of wisdom....

don't try to run each client in full screen. I know its tempting, it looks awesome and you can sit there in awe of how cool it looks.

However when it comes to tactical information gathering, the more real estate your eyes have to cover the more information you will end up missing...

I would work on making your clients as small as you can comfortably handle

or

I would take a hard look at isboxer.com and look at the videofx feature it offers. You can basically stack dozens of clients up on a few screens, pull in "video feeds" of just the important information (health, weapons, overview etc) and leave the rest of that client "hidden" in the background.

It is truly an amazing feature.

I just wanted to post back now that all the parts have been found, all the pieces have been delivered and put together. Everything is working great and I now have enough monitor space to play Eve, have websites up with information, and of course still do my work for my business.

Just for anyone else thinking of doing the same, I went with the following:

3X AtDec VFS-DV (2 monitor vertical stands)
6X Asus VN247F 23" thin bezel monitors

Instead of wall mounting the monitors as that would have put them too far from my eyes and they didn't have good options for hanging six monitors a distance from the wall, I just got desk standing mounts... and then added a large shelf about two inches above the desk. All three stands sit on that and it works perfectly for me.

I DID order the DisplayFusion software recommended (thank you Calico Jack Rackam!) and yes it's a great help in making all six monitors useful with the customizable taskbars on each monitor, as well as giving you nice screensaver and background options.

All in all it works because of all the advice given here, so thank you to all who gave me advice (even those who don't think I get outside!).