Widescreen Gaming Forum

It does reek a bit of scam. He should be selling that on eBay if it was legit, the software
package would put it over what he's asking. Sounds like it's probably torrented warez.
There's a couple "I can" and "you can" (s) that may mean he wants more $$ or you have to spend
more to get it to the described level.

Surely there are other builders out of Chicago.
I'm near Louisville, if you really need help.

Quite a bit of hackintosh info here.. decently explained and full setup guides.
http://lifehacker.com/#!hackintosh

They changed their site layout recently, use the right sidebar to scroll articles.

oh im sure all of it is torrented. il be amazed if it isnt lol. im highly doubting its a scam. this guy lives 2 towns away from me and i have been talking to him over email and the phone for the last two months. plus the deal is i guy to his house to verfiy and try everything out before i pay. plus he is offering support later on if anything were to need to be tweaked.

il check out the forum. at this point im leaning towards the fence about building it my self. like i said the actual assembly im not concerned with, its all the work with installing both os's and then assuming i wanted to match the software, all the work with locating that and getting it installed and running. (maybe im thinking its more work then it realy is)
im supposed to talk to him tonight and be getting a list of what exactly the parts are.

Dell 2007fp

Lines up almost perfectly when in portrait mode. Also matches the 3007. They made to types of this model, one with a PVA panel and another with an S-IPS panel. You want to get the IPS to make sure it matches better.


from this image you can tell the width is about the same.

EDIT: Here's a better image.

EDIT2:This might work for you as well.
Center Display: Samsung 305T+ 30" 2560x1600
Bookend Displays: 2 x Samsumg 204T 20" 1600x1200 (portrait)

ya i was going to ask about that. i found a thread talking about dell and the different rev and panels ect ect. i dont fully understand all of it yet. but what do i ask for to know if its an ips panel? craigslist will be the source. so can you tell by the serial number? or something else i can ask for.

also can some one clear up the video card choice. im thinking about 2 gtx 460 cards but honestly i have never used a nvidia card or an ati card. this is my first step into a nice computer.(i know its a big jump, i dont take baby steps. my moto is do it right once it will be cheaper in the long run.

do i run them in sli?
will the 460 support my displays?
is ati the better choice?
will the 460's support PLP?
can some one give me a (short) list of pros and cons?
thanks guys! man looking at those pics im starting to drool i cant wait to get it all up and running.

I here what you guys are saying. If I was just wanting to run windows 7 then no doubt id build it my self. The problem is I want a dual booting system.
I want the Mac side for my photography buisness and for media management.
I want the windows. Side for gamming and whatnot.
I thought about buying aused macpro and installing windows on that.but the hardware sucks.

I've been reading the hackintosh boards and honestly I could figure it out but I don't have the time to.
I'm changing the video card in this computer to x2 nvidia gtx 460 sli and he is going to put a 950w power supply in.
I already have the 3007 and just bought 1 of the 2007fp for either side.
So unless I can find someone else local that can build me a dual boot tower I'm stuck with this guy.
I just want to make sure I'm not missing something on the hardware side.
Thanks

If this is going to be for your business, then make sure your priority is with making sure the Mac side is running everything
perfect. The last thing you want is to have a update break something, or a random kernel panic and lose your work, and
have downtime to effect your business. If something is not 100% driver wise on your hackintosh you can run into
problems with QE/CI (the hardware acceleration for all the core graphics abilities of OSX) and you will be hating life trying to work with some of your image/media software.

Now onto the gaming side, what do you play? If you are not really demanding in the graphics department, some of the
cards available to use with a mac pro can be pretty nice. GTX285, 4870, 5770, 5870. Heck in my old 2008 Mac Pro (dual quad core model) i ran a apple branded 8800gt with a 30" apple cinema display, and managed to play most all the games of back then. Heck i even tried Crysis, with a mix of medium/high settings at 2560x1600 and it played pretty good. The
newer cards out now will run games even better.

- I've tried a PC dual-booting W7 & OSX. more hardware options for horsepower in your games (if you like to run on Max
with all the eye candy), but always had to fidget with things (updates/drivers/Ktexts) on the mac side.
- I've had a Mac with W7 (Bootcamped). No fidgeting but i was alway stuck with the "last-gen" graphics cards. BUT apple
provides you with all the drivers to make sure that W7 plays nice with your hardware.

Sounds like you already talked yourself into getting that deal. But it comes down to what is more important to you, your
work or your gaming. Its a trade off either way.

PS: last little suggestion. If your doing just photography, and minor video for work, consider a Mac Mini ($600), and then a dedicated gaming machine ($1500) Fits in your budget, nothing hacked/cobbled together, work is separate from play so
one can corrupt or damage the other. I have my main gaming rig juiced up to the nines. Then i have my Macbook Pro for compiling and managing my iPhone/iPad app developement. I've tried it all in the past and have found this works best for "me".

-Ray

ya i was going to ask about that. i found a thread talking about dell and the different rev and panels ect ect. i dont fully understand all of it yet. but what do i ask for to know if its an ips panel? craigslist will be the source. so can you tell by the serial number? or something else i can ask for.

The Serial Number has to end in "L" for it to be S-IPS. Anything else and it's S-PVA.

also can some one clear up the video card choice. im thinking about 2 gtx 460 cards but honestly i have never used a nvidia card or an ati card. this is my first step into a nice computer.(i know its a big jump, i dont take baby steps. my moto is do it right once it will be cheaper in the long run.

First of all, none of the vendors support this setup as a SLS (single Large Surface). They will be 3 distinctive displays. So the only way to game on all 3 is to either play games in windowed mode and expand the window across, or to use SoftTH (free btw),

do i run them in sli?

No, you cant do that with softTH

will the 460 support my displays?

As 3 seperate desktops, sure.

is ati the better choice?

Depends on the card. You want to get the most powerful single card for you main display, and then you can reasonably cheap out on the second card.

will the 460's support PLP?

With SoftTH sure, but you'll only have the power of one 460 working for you.

can some one give me a (short) list of pros and cons?
thanks guys! man looking at those pics im starting to drool i cant wait to get it all up and running.

Pro's:
Don't need as much room as I do (I run 3 x 3007's)
With smaller satellite displays, the main focus is in the middle.
Imho, there aren't that many pro's, it just cool to do.

Con's:
Setting up games with SoftTH
Not as much FOV
Lower support than with a hardware solution (like eyefinity, surround, th2go)
Less power available to push more pixels
Miss-matching panels
More headaches
More time to setup
2 panels refreshing horizontally, while 1 refreshing vertically (v-sync is a must)
etc.

_________________
System Core: | Intel Core i5-2500K + ASUS P8Z68-V + 16GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333 MHz | Win7 x64 | MSI R7970 Lightning 3GB [1105/1400] |
Display: | 3 x Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP-HC @ 7680x1600 | Dell u3011 |

If this is going to be for your business, then make sure your priority is with making sure the Mac side is running everything
perfect. The last thing you want is to have a update break something, or a random kernel panic and lose your work, and
have downtime to effect your business. If something is not 100% driver wise on your hackintosh you can run into
problems with QE/CI (the hardware acceleration for all the core graphics abilities of OSX) and you will be hating life trying to work with some of your image/media software.

hello ray,
this is exactly the reason i am hesitating on programing this machine my self. i was reading on life hacker last night(btw i dont know if its just me or what, but i was having a real hard time with there site layout) it seems like programing osx is straight forward enough that i can get through it all. my problem lies with issues down the road. the guy selling the tower claims he has built hundreds of them and has worked out the bugs to where i wont experience any problems. if i do he is there for support. at the same time i feel like if im going to choose this dual boot route. i should have the know how to fix what ever problems may come up.

i thought about the mac mini route, a good friend of mine has let me borrow his (he upgraded to an imac) im currently doing all my photo work on it. the problem is im so sick of looking and the little rainbow wheel that im ready to through it out the window. moving from photoshop to aperture to iphoto to the web and back takes forever. im looking to have my transitions with photo work be real fast and smooth. plus i do hdr stuff where you over lay there different exposers over each other for one shot. the mini is just real underpowered imo.
also if i were to have separate systems how would that work with the 3 displays? would i have to plug and replug depending on which tower i wanted to use.

in the end im looking for a dual boot system that is going to give me little to no issues or hassle.

on the gaming side im looking for a new experience with the tri monitor set up. so yes i want to have eye candy. at the same time i dont want to spend huge money to be on the cutting edge of gpu performance. no liquid cooling or any of that crazy stuff.
is it possible to have a hackintosh running that isnt going to give me problems at every corner?
thanks again

If this is going to be for your business, then make sure your priority is with making sure the Mac side is running everything
perfect. The last thing you want is to have a update break something, or a random kernel panic and lose your work, and
have downtime to effect your business. If something is not 100% driver wise on your hackintosh you can run into
problems with QE/CI (the hardware acceleration for all the core graphics abilities of OSX) and you will be hating life trying to work with some of your image/media software.

hello ray,
this is exactly the reason i am hesitating on programing this machine my self. i was reading on life hacker last night(btw i dont know if its just me or what, but i was having a real hard time with there site layout) it seems like programing osx is straight forward enough that i can get through it all. my problem lies with issues down the road. the guy selling the tower claims he has built hundreds of them and has worked out the bugs to where i wont experience any problems. if i do he is there for support. at the same time i feel like if im going to choose this dual boot route. i should have the know how to fix what ever problems may come up.

i thought about the mac mini route, a good friend of mine has let me borrow his (he upgraded to an imac) im currently doing all my photo work on it. the problem is im so sick of looking and the little rainbow wheel that im ready to through it out the window. moving from photoshop to aperture to iphoto to the web and back takes forever. im looking to have my transitions with photo work be real fast and smooth. plus i do hdr stuff where you over lay there different exposers over each other for one shot. the mini is just real underpowered imo.
also if i were to have separate systems how would that work with the 3 displays? would i have to plug and replug depending on which tower i wanted to use.

in the end im looking for a dual boot system that is going to give me little to no issues or hassle.

on the gaming side im looking for a new experience with the tri monitor set up. so yes i want to have eye candy. at the same time i dont want to spend huge money to be on the cutting edge of gpu performance. no liquid cooling or any of that crazy stuff.
is it possible to have a hackintosh running that isnt going to give me problems at every corner?
thanks again

at the same time i feel like if im going to choose this dual boot route. i should have the know how to fix what ever problems may come up.

exactly, if your not able to fix problems yourself, don't do it. just imagine how frustrated you would be when something happens, you are in the middle of a project that needs to be completed for work. don't get me wrong, i like messing around with hackintoshes (along with linux and unix machines), its fun for me to tinker around, but those projects are just extra machines that i put together for friends or family, and will probably be on "tech support" duty for the rest of my life, cause they have no clue how it works, they just want it to work.

the problem is im so sick of looking and the little rainbow wheel that im ready to through it out the window. moving from photoshop to aperture to iphoto to the web and back takes forever. im looking to have my transitions with photo work be real fast and smooth. plus i do hdr stuff where you over lay there different exposers over each other for one shot. the mini is just real underpowered imo.

older Mac Mini are notoriously equipped as is when you buy them from the store. I have a 2007 model mac mini with the core2duo 1.83ghz intel chip inside and it was seriously getting on my nerves for the same reason as you described...that damned beach ball. I did a little digging around to see why it was so slow...... #1 - it came with 1GB of RAM (seems absurd in this day and age) the system monitor show that just about every time that beach ball came up it was paging in/out to the hard drive for virtual memory. #2 - the stock 80gb hard drive was full, and it was having to seek & scavenge around to find random space on the drive to use for virtual memory.

as i'm writing this now, i'm reloading OSX on it & bootcamp. i just installed 4GB of ram, and a 500gb hard drive, and upgraded the dvd-rom to a dvd-RW. going to give it to my sister and her husband. they have never used a mac so i put the boot camp / windows 7 on there so he can run his accounting software for work, and use OSX for daily web browsing, movie watching, facebooking, etc.

the current 2010/2011 model mac mini (new unibody design) has better specs. 2.53ghz dual core, 2gb ram (can upgrade to 8GB for $119 from OWC) and it has nvidia 9400M graphics (compared to integrated intel graphics on mine) Basically it is the 13" macbook pro squashed into a square.

morale of the story, always make sure you have too much memory. all those beach balls / hourglasses / spinning blue circles is the system swapping out virtual memory to the hard drive, and waiting for the slow a$$ drive to hurry up. heck playing WoW on my PC was slow and jerky. borrowing memory from another machine to go from 4 to 8gb fixed it. next day went to frys and bought 16gb for this machine.

in the end im looking for a dual boot system that is going to give me little to no issues or hassle.

the meter would be leaning more towards Mac+bootcamp end of the meter, and less towards a PC+hackintosh. From the couple that i have made for friends/family i always get a phone call when a new update for OSX comes out, and if its ok to apply it.

on the gaming side im looking for a new experience with the tri monitor set up. so yes i want to have eye candy. at the same time i dont want to spend huge money to be on the cutting edge of gpu performance. no liquid cooling or any of that crazy stuff.

if you go with a mac, the only way you can do eyefinity right now is with a Mac Pro with a 5770 or 5870. The 5870 is a decent card, but a generation behind. with a mac you will NEVER be able to do NV-Surround with the cards that are available now / in the near future.

if you want to do the PC route, a current gen video card with MORE than 1gb of vram would be best. multi-monitors with eye candy turned up DEVOUR VRAM. problem you run into is the 2GB 6000-series ATI cards wont work correctly with OSX. (no 6000 series drivers for osx yet) you may be able to use the 5870 (2gb) cards. 460 SLI you mentioned should work, but i would be nice to have a little more than 1GB per card. 470 or 480, 570 or 580 would be better but i havent seen much on the hackintosh boards about them working 100% yet. will have to check some more.

is it possible to have a hackintosh running that isnt going to give me problems at every corner?

they can be fairly trouble free once the initial setup issues are taking care of. But, you have to make sure that you a fair amount of research before you click "OK" on the software update window. I remember everyone hackintoshing their HP mini netbooks, until one of OSX updates removed the Intel Atom processor support from the main OS Kernel. Boom, no boot anymore. then people had to install a patched kernel, and yadda-yadda-hassle-hassle

if you are going to hackintosh, spend a good amount of time on InsanlyMac forums, and TonyMacX86 forums. See what people are having problems with, and try to avoid their mistakes.



Sorry i don't have a single "do this and you'll be fine" answer. Just making sure you are as educated & prepared as possible to make the correct decision for what fits you best.

at the same time i feel like if im going to choose this dual boot route. i should have the know how to fix what ever problems may come up.

exactly, if your not able to fix problems yourself, don't do it. just imagine how frustrated you would be when something happens, you are in the middle of a project that needs to be completed for work. don't get me wrong, i like messing around with hackintoshes (along with linux and unix machines), its fun for me to tinker around, but those projects are just extra machines that i put together for friends or family, and will probably be on "tech support" duty for the rest of my life, cause they have no clue how it works, they just want it to work.

the problem is im so sick of looking and the little rainbow wheel that im ready to through it out the window. moving from photoshop to aperture to iphoto to the web and back takes forever. im looking to have my transitions with photo work be real fast and smooth. plus i do hdr stuff where you over lay there different exposers over each other for one shot. the mini is just real underpowered imo.

older Mac Mini are notoriously equipped as is when you buy them from the store. I have a 2007 model mac mini with the core2duo 1.83ghz intel chip inside and it was seriously getting on my nerves for the same reason as you described...that damned beach ball. I did a little digging around to see why it was so slow...... #1 - it came with 1GB of RAM (seems absurd in this day and age) the system monitor show that just about every time that beach ball came up it was paging in/out to the hard drive for virtual memory. #2 - the stock 80gb hard drive was full, and it was having to seek & scavenge around to find random space on the drive to use for virtual memory.

as i'm writing this now, i'm reloading OSX on it & bootcamp. i just installed 4GB of ram, and a 500gb hard drive, and upgraded the dvd-rom to a dvd-RW. going to give it to my sister and her husband. they have never used a mac so i put the boot camp / windows 7 on there so he can run his accounting software for work, and use OSX for daily web browsing, movie watching, facebooking, etc.

the current 2010/2011 model mac mini (new unibody design) has better specs. 2.53ghz dual core, 2gb ram (can upgrade to 8GB for $119 from OWC) and it has nvidia 9400M graphics (compared to integrated intel graphics on mine) Basically it is the 13" macbook pro squashed into a square.

morale of the story, always make sure you have too much memory. all those beach balls / hourglasses / spinning blue circles is the system swapping out virtual memory to the hard drive, and waiting for the slow a$$ drive to hurry up. heck playing WoW on my PC was slow and jerky. borrowing memory from another machine to go from 4 to 8gb fixed it. next day went to frys and bought 16gb for this machine.

in the end im looking for a dual boot system that is going to give me little to no issues or hassle.

the meter would be leaning more towards Mac+bootcamp end of the meter, and less towards a PC+hackintosh. From the couple that i have made for friends/family i always get a phone call when a new update for OSX comes out, and if its ok to apply it.

on the gaming side im looking for a new experience with the tri monitor set up. so yes i want to have eye candy. at the same time i dont want to spend huge money to be on the cutting edge of gpu performance. no liquid cooling or any of that crazy stuff.

if you go with a mac, the only way you can do eyefinity right now is with a Mac Pro with a 5770 or 5870. The 5870 is a decent card, but a generation behind. with a mac you will NEVER be able to do NV-Surround with the cards that are available now / in the near future.

if you want to do the PC route, a current gen video card with MORE than 1gb of vram would be best. multi-monitors with eye candy turned up DEVOUR VRAM. problem you run into is the 2GB 6000-series ATI cards wont work correctly with OSX. (no 6000 series drivers for osx yet) you may be able to use the 5870 (2gb) cards. 460 SLI you mentioned should work, but i would be nice to have a little more than 1GB per card. 470 or 480, 570 or 580 would be better but i havent seen much on the hackintosh boards about them working 100% yet. will have to check some more.

is it possible to have a hackintosh running that isnt going to give me problems at every corner?

they can be fairly trouble free once the initial setup issues are taking care of. But, you have to make sure that you a fair amount of research before you click "OK" on the software update window. I remember everyone hackintoshing their HP mini netbooks, until one of OSX updates removed the Intel Atom processor support from the main OS Kernel. Boom, no boot anymore. then people had to install a patched kernel, and yadda-yadda-hassle-hassle

if you are going to hackintosh, spend a good amount of time on InsanlyMac forums, and TonyMacX86 forums. See what people are having problems with, and try to avoid their mistakes.



Sorry i don't have a single "do this and you'll be fine" answer. Just making sure you are as educated & prepared as possible to make the correct decision for what fits you best.

thank you for the information.
here is where i currently am at with this project.
i talk with the builder. he claims he has built 100's of dual boot setups. i spoke with him on the phone for bout 1.5 hours about all the details. he is going to give me a complete copy of my osx drive on an external drive. he told me to put it in the closet for a riny day. if that day were to come. i should plug it in and call him. he will then use that drive to repair or fix any issues im experiencing. if the old drive cannot be fixed i can drag all of my data on to the rainy day drive and be up and running untill a solution is figured out.
he says that he has had only two systems crash other then that everything has worked as planned.

ok here is the update with the video card dilemma. up untill last night i was planning on a PLP set up using the 3007 ad 2 2007fp as bookends. i then realized that i was assuming this was supported.
after reading on the web till 2am about softh, running games in windowed mode and all that. it seems its a big pita to get games running on a PLP set up.

is this the case? does soft th work well or is it not worth the headach.

so i said to my self well if i cant do PLP then i will jsut game on the 30 and put my efforts to maxing that out.
i have a few questions.

1. what video cards should i be considering to run the 30 inch at 2560x1600 with the graphics cranked up?
i was looking at a msi 460 card that has 2gb of vram i think the price was 229 on newegg. two of those would give me 4gb.

2. is there any chance either ati or nvidia will support PLP in the future? and would PLP be a software update or a hardware update? if there is a chance, and its a software update who do you guys see as being the first to update to PLP

3. i ws set on nvidia cards due to the reviews of how easy they were to set up surround gaming. now that that may not be an option do i stick with my nvidia choice or start looking at ati cards.

4. if i was going to go the soft th route.....what does not having the sli/crossfire mean to me in real word experience? is the sacrafice of no sli worth the tripple screen?

i know im asking a lot of questions but im trying real hard to get an understanding of tripple screen setups and high end graphics cards. i said before that this is my first real nice computer. so im sure il be asking questions on this thread for months to come even after i get the tower. all he is wating on right now is for me to tell him what two video cards i want.
thanks again guys

1. what video cards should i be considering to run the 30 inch at 2560x1600 with the graphics cranked up?
i was looking at a msi 460 card that has 2gb of vram i think the price was 229 on newegg. two of those would give me 4gb.

460 in SLI should be ok. the 2GB cards are a good choice. two of those would still give you 2GB. In SLI the memory is Not Additive, info is Mirrored from card A to card B.

2. is there any chance either ati or nvidia will support PLP in the future? and would PLP be a software update or a hardware update? if there is a chance, and its a software update who do you guys see as being the first to update to PLP

I wouldnt hold my breath. If they were to do it, ATI probably would do it first, and Nvidia may follow. But.....I wouldnt hold my breath

3. i ws set on nvidia cards due to the reviews of how easy they were to set up surround gaming. now that that may not be an option do i stick with my nvidia choice or start looking at ati cards.

despite alot of the Fan Boys you see for either ATI or Nvidia, they are both good cards. Make sure you get atleast a 1.5GB ~ 2GB card. At 2560x1600 resolution & turning up the AA you'll [i]could[/i] run over 1GB or VRAM usage. If you do performance will take a nose dive when you run out of VRAM.

4. if i was going to go the soft th route.....what does not having the sli/crossfire mean to me in real word experience? is the sacrafice of no sli worth the tripple screen?

i've done softTH before. was the first thing i tried before i bought my first Matrox TripleHead2Go box. SoftTH is FREE, and works ok. But it is FAR from plug-n-play. its like trying a hackintosh for your first time, but without a whole lot of information available on the web to get things to work right. there is alot of tinkering / trial-and-error. Also you are limited to DX9. you wont be able to take advantage of al the new eye candy from DX10 & DX11 in newer games.



ask as many questions as you want/need. i'd hate to see you spend $2100, and have it turn out to not be what you wanted or be a disappointment.


-Ray

ask as many questions as you want/need. i'd hate to see you spend $2100, and have it turn out to not be what you wanted or be a disappointment.


-Ray


thanks Ray,

i dont understand why PLP isnt supported. to me looking at different setups, it seems to me this would be the one they went with. but three of the same was how it went. something about having the 30 inch in center with the 20s in portrait just looks right.
im confused by it.
almost to the point where its a big let down. sucks there is no way around it.
even with maxtor not making the tripple head be able to do it. why wouldn't they want to sell just that many more.
even if the segment is small.

so i need to only pay attention to the amount of vram on one card?

what is the amount of vram that i should get to handle what ever game i may end up playing at 2560x1600. if it means i spend a LITTLE more money fine. to know im good with current and near future games? my expectations for this computer are high at this point and im trying to define that line between what i need and whats overkill.

my builder has informed me that he has done a little digging, he found that there are some bugs and problems with some of the gtx cards while running osx. apparently there is a software fix that is supposed to come in a week or so to fix this issue. so if i want to wait for that i can. the other option is to switch to ati cards where there are no issues.

can you give me a quick unbiased run down on the differences between ati and nvidia cards? major flaws, pros and cons, build quality, noticeable in game differences, things like that?

my builder is stating that ati cards are better for mac osx they are cheaper and offer higher vram. but also said he isnt a huge gammer so cant really make a educated suggestion.

he suggested i do some research. he also doesn't want me to be disappointed. problem is all this time i have been researching the gtx470 cards and haven't even looked at the ati cards. now im kinda stuck on the nvidia cards because ive read so many positive reviews and comments. guess i have to start reading about the ati cards now.

hell buy the time im done with this il be ready to be a gaming pc builder lol

thanks again for your help. any information saves me hours of searching for it online.