Chicharron

The intended use case for this machine is mainly as a daily driver. It's a gaming machine that's being retired. Its still got life left in it but it's been superseded by another machine and it's turning mainly into a workstation running Linux. Mainly what I'm looking at is the question if there's anything that I can do to squeeze a little more out of it or have we pretty much hit the limit of what the hardware can do and it's just more cost effective to rebuild it from scratch with different hardware. CPU - Intel Core i7 4770 @ 3.40GHz RAM - 24.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 679MHz Motherboard - ASUS Z87-PLUS (SOCKET 1150) Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060

I'm putting together a system build and it's going to have three displays. Trouble is I'm getting utterly lost in the blizzard of marketeerring wank and trying to read through guides hasn't helped much. Linus' video was...helpful but I'm still fairly lost and could use some guidance. All three need to have two DisplayPort inputs. A VESA mount option would be preferred but if that's going to make me forego a good choice, I'm willing to sacrifice it. Not interested in RGB or speakers, I would never use them. For budget, I'd like to keep it under $1,000 per monitor but if an extra $100-$200 would get me something amazing, I could make that work. Display one is the center display. I'm looking for a bigger gaming monitor, probably curved, in the ~30-32in range, high refresh rate. Display three is the right display. That's mainly for watching things and as an overflow for other tasks that end up needing more real estate. I'm also shooting for a curved monitor. Refresh rate doesn't have to be amazing, it's not for gaming, but higher picture quality is important. Display three is on the left. It's going to be a portrait mode display mainly for reading and as another overflow window. Flat is better here, not displaying moving images so this is the more flexible one. What should I be looking at?

The workload varies. Sometimes it's sorting through a load of documents and having twenty or thirty PDFs open at once, sometimes it's having fifty internet windows open at once, sometimes it's running specialized software, sometimes it's copying a load of things to storage media for distribution or backups, sometimes it's editing pictures, it really depends on what I have to do that day and I usually do my work listening to music or playing a video (either streaming or saved) on one monitor. The rack mount is more for space saving than it is because I have servers already. I have several other machines that I'm migrating to rack mount cases because I'm tired of juggling four or five different desktop cases. I don't actually do much with servers.

I need a little help finalizing a build. This is intended to be a Linux workstation PC that's going to be rack mounted in a 4U case. The use case for this is a heavy multitasking workstation. I do a lot of freelance work that covers most of the spectrum of computer work and I need something that's not going to stutter if I have a heavy load on it. I have a five monitor array now and I use all five screens regularly. The video card needs at least two HDMI and one DisplayPort outputs. My goal is to keep the budget under $1,500. PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gTnYHh Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gTnYHh/by_merchant/ CPU: Intel - Core i7-8700K 3.7GHz 6-Core Processor ($364.99 @ SuperBiiz) CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper 212X Dual Fan 82.9 CFM CPU Cooler ($32.22 @ Newegg) Motherboard: MSI - Z370-A PRO ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($109.23 @ Amazon) Memory: G.Skill - Trident Z 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-4000 Memory ($251.99 @ Newegg Business) Storage: Samsung - 860 Evo 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($279.99 @ Amazon) Storage: Western Digital - BLACK SERIES 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($108.99 @ OutletPC) Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1050 2GB Windforce OC Video Card ($159.99 @ Amazon) Power Supply: Corsair - CX (2017) 450W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($23.98 @ Newegg) Total: $1331.38

That's for PIP or multiple OS on one display. I want to be able to use one OS at a time across all the displays then switch to a new OS and bring my input devices with me. It's cool, but I don't need to use multiple OS at once, I want the ability to "hotswap" OS on a display and with input devices. I'm also not wild about relying on a piece of software that may or may not be around a year from now. Not to mention the reliance on a $600 monitor. Spending nearly $2,000 on (admittedly beautiful) displays alone is a bit too much of a financial bite.

Alright so I have a bit of an odd project planned and I'm hung up on one aspect of it. I'm putting together three separate machines and I would like to be able to use the same monitor array, keyboard, and mouse on each one. Not at once, I'm fine with only using one at a time but I obviously don't want to start swapping cables around every time I want to access another one of the machines. I know a KVM hardware switch is the usual go-to for this but virtually all I've found don't have either the right number of connections or the right type. The switch would need to connect a three monitor array (HDMI) and a mouse/keyboard (USB 2.0). What are my options here?