Panj
Junior Member
Ola, anandppl, hope some of you will find the time to help me with this.
So here is my situation: I'm a small business owner. We deal in what could loosely be described as mechanical engineering (planing heating/cooling/gas/water/sewage/air/gases and special installations) and our tools of choice are AutoCAD and MS Visio, with ArchiCAD, Excell, Word, Acrobat etc as supporting tools. We're all used to dealing with windows, especially since AutoCAD and Visio AFAIK don't have a suitable alternative in the Linux world. I'm a bit pro Intel (at the moment) and pro ATi (also at the moment), but would be prepared to consider amd / nvidia if someone proposes a suitable setup. My briliant chief engineer is an older guy (60+) that has somewhat of a fetish for Dell (important).
Currently he's working on a some kind of a dell (dual core pentium @ 2,8 GHz (i believe), 1gig of ram, HD2xxx Radeon - that I added myself (and learned about the single slot graphic card case-imposed restriction) , 500 GB HDD, WinXP), a dell 30" lcd @ 2560x1600 + a samsung 20" 4:3 @ 1200x1600 (portrait) lcd.
In the last months he expressed a need for a third display, that he could use physically mirroring the samsung 20" (in the portrait mode, but on the other side of the dell 30" - that I found at a reasonable price) and a new DELL pc (faster, MORE RAM). Now, since we live and work in Croatia, Dell is somewhat of a luxury (in average the USA prices in $ have to be multiplied with 10, although the currency conversion is at about 5.5 HRK to 1 $, to get our Dell / other pc component prices over here) and the dell guys over here sent me an offer for the lowest priced dell pc that supports 3+ displays and it came up to 2000 EUR (2800$) which is a bit to much for me at the moment with the display cost and such (the economic crisis hits a bit harder over here, in the 2.5nd world countries).
Now, here are my questions. First of all, the dell setup the offer was made on (they named it DELL OptiPlex 960MT) had an Intel Q9550, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, on an Intel Q45 (probably BTX) board, the video card was nVidia QUADRO 450 16x, 512 MB, 4 X Display Port with DVI-I adapters. Since nvidia states those adapters only to be single link DVI and I believe I've read somewhere that the DELL display in question (i believe it's a 3007something, can check later if needed) needs dual link DVI to be able to utilize the full 2560x1600 resolution (and i don't think it has Display Ports) is this video card even usable in this situation?
The other question is this. If I chose to buy a Dell pc (to satisfy the engineer's fetish), where my base criteria would be the ability to add a PCIE X16 graphic card (for example an HD5770 or 5850 with Eyefinity, whichever would support the combined resolution of 1200x1600 + 2560x1600 + 1200x1600) and the power supply that has enough "juice" to power such a graphic card (that would have to have a mobo with that slot and the case with a rear "hole" for a dual slot graphic card plus a power supply IMO of a minimum 400W) and DIY add the before-mentioned graphic card, which Dell setup would you people suggest I go for?
To be honest, I believe that any C2D or C2Q proc with at least 4GB of RAM would more than satisfy his need for speed, that leaving the case and the power supply being the only problem.
At last, a big thank you in advance to any and all that read through all of this (I know I sometimes go overboard) and even a bigger one to those who spend time on helping me.
pozdrav
So here is my situation: I'm a small business owner. We deal in what could loosely be described as mechanical engineering (planing heating/cooling/gas/water/sewage/air/gases and special installations) and our tools of choice are AutoCAD and MS Visio, with ArchiCAD, Excell, Word, Acrobat etc as supporting tools. We're all used to dealing with windows, especially since AutoCAD and Visio AFAIK don't have a suitable alternative in the Linux world. I'm a bit pro Intel (at the moment) and pro ATi (also at the moment), but would be prepared to consider amd / nvidia if someone proposes a suitable setup. My briliant chief engineer is an older guy (60+) that has somewhat of a fetish for Dell (important).
Currently he's working on a some kind of a dell (dual core pentium @ 2,8 GHz (i believe), 1gig of ram, HD2xxx Radeon - that I added myself (and learned about the single slot graphic card case-imposed restriction) , 500 GB HDD, WinXP), a dell 30" lcd @ 2560x1600 + a samsung 20" 4:3 @ 1200x1600 (portrait) lcd.
In the last months he expressed a need for a third display, that he could use physically mirroring the samsung 20" (in the portrait mode, but on the other side of the dell 30" - that I found at a reasonable price) and a new DELL pc (faster, MORE RAM). Now, since we live and work in Croatia, Dell is somewhat of a luxury (in average the USA prices in $ have to be multiplied with 10, although the currency conversion is at about 5.5 HRK to 1 $, to get our Dell / other pc component prices over here) and the dell guys over here sent me an offer for the lowest priced dell pc that supports 3+ displays and it came up to 2000 EUR (2800$) which is a bit to much for me at the moment with the display cost and such (the economic crisis hits a bit harder over here, in the 2.5nd world countries).
Now, here are my questions. First of all, the dell setup the offer was made on (they named it DELL OptiPlex 960MT) had an Intel Q9550, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, on an Intel Q45 (probably BTX) board, the video card was nVidia QUADRO 450 16x, 512 MB, 4 X Display Port with DVI-I adapters. Since nvidia states those adapters only to be single link DVI and I believe I've read somewhere that the DELL display in question (i believe it's a 3007something, can check later if needed) needs dual link DVI to be able to utilize the full 2560x1600 resolution (and i don't think it has Display Ports) is this video card even usable in this situation?
The other question is this. If I chose to buy a Dell pc (to satisfy the engineer's fetish), where my base criteria would be the ability to add a PCIE X16 graphic card (for example an HD5770 or 5850 with Eyefinity, whichever would support the combined resolution of 1200x1600 + 2560x1600 + 1200x1600) and the power supply that has enough "juice" to power such a graphic card (that would have to have a mobo with that slot and the case with a rear "hole" for a dual slot graphic card plus a power supply IMO of a minimum 400W) and DIY add the before-mentioned graphic card, which Dell setup would you people suggest I go for?
To be honest, I believe that any C2D or C2Q proc with at least 4GB of RAM would more than satisfy his need for speed, that leaving the case and the power supply being the only problem.
At last, a big thank you in advance to any and all that read through all of this (I know I sometimes go overboard) and even a bigger one to those who spend time on helping me.
pozdrav
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