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Thom Davis Has the Best Seizure Ever

Tom Edwards — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:09:20 -0500

A man needs a place of his own, and when Thom Davis found using the family computer for his gaming pursuits to be less than ideal, he set about building the Seizure, the ultimate form-follows-function gaming rig. His goal was to create a rig that was gaming friendly, had no exposed wires, and looked good in the living room. We think he succeeded on all three counts.

While building the Seizure, Thom discovered that connector manufacturers definitely tend to think “inside the box,” and typically don’t make cables suitable for such a large rig, but with the assistance of a local electronics supply store, he was able to create the 6-foot cables he needed to complete the job.

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The two front LED panels were inspired by ROC, the computer featured in Airplane II.

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These switches aren’t merely for show, each controls a different function, including monitors, audio, lighting, and the minifridge. A universal power supply guarantees mission-critical components will keep humming for 20 minutes after a power outage.

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Thom and his wife spent many a night hot-gluing 1,500 LEDs to the front panels—nothing spells romance like a little candlelight, a bottle of wine, and a glue gun!

To enter the Rig of the Month contest, your submission packet must contain your name, street address, and daytime phone number; no fewer than three high-res JPEGs (minimum size 1024x768) of your modified PC; and a 300-word description of what your PC represents and how it was modified. Emailed submissions should be sent to rig@maximumpc.com. Snail mail submissions should be sent to Rig of the Month, c/o Maximum PC, 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080.

Matrox Soups Up TripleHead2Go Digital Edition: Up to 3x1680x1050!

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:35:02 -0500

Matrox's TripleHead2Go Digital Edition, which enables you to drive up to three digital monitors from a single DVI port, has just received a significant upgrade.

We last encountered TripleHead2Go Digital Edition in our January 2008 review of the Hypersonic Sonic Boom OCX flight simulator PC. Hypersonic used it to drive three 1280x1024 digital monitors for a 3840x1024 panoramic view of the wild blue virtual yonder.

So, what's new with TripleHead2Go Digital Edition? Now, you can run up to three widescreen displays at 1680x1050 or 1440x900 resolutions. 3x1680x150 gives you an eye-popping 5040x1050 desktop, while 3x1440x900 provides a slightly less stunning 4320x900 desktop (and, it also supports WXGA's 1366x768 resolution).

And, the best news is that you don't need to buy a new version of the external box: if your graphics card has an ATI or NVIDIA DirectX 10 GPU with the latest graphics driver and a dual-link DVI connector running on Windows XP or Vista, all you need to do is:

Upgrade your TripleHead2Go Digital Edition's firmware to version 6.52 or later
Install the GXM software suite 2.03.02 or later
Choose your monitors' resolution from the display.

If you're not sure you're ready for the upgrade, the upgrade page also offers a link to the GXM System Compatibility Tool.

Unlike Matrox's graphics cards, which aren't designed for gaming, TripleHead2Go works with your existing graphics card to provide a wider desktop for gaming or other tasks. If you're already using one, or think you'd like to give one a try, tell us what you think.

Update 8-08-08: A hat tip to reader spaced_out_monkey, a user of TripleHead2Go, for pointing us to the Matrox Surround Graphics website. It offers a list of over 250 games that work with TripleHead2Go, downloads, wallpapers, tech tips, and more.

Product image courtesy Matrox Graphics

How to make a multi-monitor compatible wallpaper

Will Smith — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:40:28 -0500

I run a delightful tri-monitor display at work, and over the years, I've always been pissed that wallpaper just doesn't display right with multiple monitors. Not only can you not display separate backgrounds on different displays, but if your displays are different resolution, one of them is going to look either stretched and fugly, or cropped and weird. So, last week I set out to figure out an easy way to make multimon-friendly wallpaper.

Here's my desktop layout at work. I have three monitors connected to two cards, and the monitor numbered 2 is my primary display.

My display setup consists of three displays--my primary display is a 1920x1200 LCD in the center, with a 1280x1024 display on either side of the primary. So, the first thing I did was fire up Photoshop and create a template of my display, with distinct colors on each area, so that I could easily tell which wallpaper is showing on which screen. My test image is 4480 pixels wide by 1200 pixels high, click the image below to see the full size mock.

My super-sexy triple-monitor wallpaper test screen.

But, unfortunately, that didn't work. The images were all misaligned. The left screen box on my wallpaper was displaying on my center screen, my center screen box was on the right screen, and the right screen box was on the left screen. Not good. However, I was able to quickly figure out what was going on. Apparently, Windows displays the top-left corner of your wallpaper on the primary screen, then wraps around from right to left. When it got to the end of the right screen, it wrapped the remainder of the wallpaper to the left-most screen.

After a little trial and error, I was able to create a wallpaper that displayed correctly on my desktop, with the proper boxes in the proper places.

So, I went back to Photoshop, to try and create a template that would display correctly. I moved the left screen box to the right side of the right screen box, and then moved the entire image over so that the top left corner of the center screen box was in the top-left corner of the image (click the image above to download the full image). When I tested the new test image, I had much better results; and I used that wallpaper as a template for drop in the images I actually wanted to use. Below, you can see my finished result (click the image to download the actual wallpaper).
The finished product, click the image to download my sweet wallpaper.