Exo

Hi BEHMR, body work looks sweet and your ICE & carputer sound like a fantastic setup. My carputer is still in the design phase at the moment but for using dual monitors check out the link below. I haven't used this personally but it seems to get recommended quite a bit in here. Keep us posted on your kick-*** system!

http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

MP3Car.com

 

CFlux

As far as the video goes, you can easily run 4 screens by using two video cards. I accualy have 5 monitors on my desktop when I'm at school all showing diffrent things. The only trouble is if the touchscreen software will be ok with it, but I don't think it will have a problem. For sound quality the soundblaster is by far not the best, though it's not bad. Since you sound sold on it I guess it dosn't realy matter anymore but there are many professional level sound cards that have better audio quality for the same price. The reasion the soundblaster is so popular is it has good quality sound without taxing the system, most pofessional audio cards require more system resources but will give better audio quality.

jrtf83

really nice ride man, that setup w/ the console for front and back looks like it'll be really clean. If i were you i'd try and keep to a low power usage pc. I'm not sure sound quality is going to be affected much, depends on what type of sound you're going to be playing methinks, mp3's are only going to sound so good, DVD on the other hand... esp if your headunit can recieve a multichannel input. If you do decide to go with a larger more power hungry pc i bet you could use dual Opus power supplies and have one power just the mobo and cards and the other powering drives, fans and screens. just some ideas i could be waaay off.
hey! just read your story and noticed yer going to SBCC, i'm at UCSB, sucks you don't have the M3 anymore, but we oughta meet up and cruise sometime, those mountains are fun. How's that adj suspension canyon carve?

__________________
-Ross
02 Camaro SS
Opus 150W($150 used) Morex Venus 668 Case($109) Epia M10k($166) 128 Megs ($0), Maxtor 200Gig($76) CD-R/DVD($29) Lilliput 7"($285) Buffalo Airstation($42) Holux GPS($53) GM10-AUX(audio input, $72)
Tot: $983
Buying stereo!

powerslide

Behmer, please tell me more about your OBDI software!!!

Skraggy_uk

Hey Behmer you need a little bit of this, for a real show car.

__________________
4x4 in a turbo stylee.

justICE

Hey are those pics of the car "floating on water" up near santa barbara? A place called red rock?

Skraggy_uk

Don't know mate. I got them from a link that was doing the rounds a couple of weeks ago. all I know is the car is fully modded, and driveable as a show car.

__________________
4x4 in a turbo stylee.

Confused

BEHMER,

Lovely car! Very very tasteful body kit, it looks like it should have been on the car from the factory

As for your system/solution, i'll try to give some input of the way that I would approach it


Multiple monitors/software:
Get Xenarc screens. I can tell that you'll only be disappointed by anything else. Depending on what information you want to display, you can have up to individual screens when using Windows! Using VGA splitters, this can increase! A.I.M.E.E is going to allow you to have different screens on different monitors. For example, put GPS and audio on one screen, and have video/dvd/visualisations on another (which could then be split up to drive x more screens all showing the same image). Or, you could have one purely for GPS, one for audio/video control, and another for video/dvd, and another which will show visualisations. It will all be fully user configurable. Danceheaven (my co-developer) is having at least 2 screens in his FTO, quite possibly 3-4, so of course AIMEE will be configurable to do what he wants it to do, which is very similar to you!

As for audio, the SB Extigy is a good card, but of course, it's not the best, that crown is for non-gaming, professional cards, that cost a significant amount more, and are more taxing on resources! You may be happy with the Extigy, as you said, it's going to be better than onboard audio, and comparible to a reasonable PCI card (such as the Audigy 2)

Power:
I wouldn't go for anything less than an Opus 150W, or keep your eye out for the latest Sproggy, which is rumoured to be able to give out ~250W! Also, don't under-estimate the Opus, it's capable of more than it's rated at, unlike most "standard" PSUs, which often grossly over-estimate their capabilities!


This sounds like an awesome project, and I look forward to seeing more details about it, and of course, feel free to ask if you require any extra information


Garry

__________________

MP3Car.com

 

Scouse Monkey

Sick ride!

Had a quick scan through some of the answers but though i would add my own bit about displays:

There is 2 ways you can get 4 displays. The first is to use a four output graphics card, Nvidia make them (matrox may do too) and they are expensive as they are meant for cad etc. The easiest i reckon is to use 2 dual head graphics cards and most graphics cards around now are able to output to 2 monitors. For this you use an AGP card and a PCI card e.g. radeon 9200 PCI. There are some issues with certian cards in this way and i am not sure if it best for your system to use 2 similar graphics cards so you only have to install one set of drivers but i have some links on my home PC which i will send you when i get home to sites all about multiple monitors. Using this method of adding PCI cards you can just keep adding and adding cards until your PCI slots are full up.

There is one issue with this in that i think the 3D performance of the secondary card may be a bit iffy or none at all but DVD playback should be ok so you will have to choose which screens need what type of performance.

One route you could possibly go is to get a matrox triple head AGP card and a dual head PCI card. Then you can run 3 displays with full 3D e.g. the back two and your GPS if it needs 3D and then have your 2D control interface on the other card and then you still have a spare VGA output for something else.

If you have never used a dual screen PC before it is worth playing around with one for a while as you will find the software can do useful things such as have cetain monitors as 'extended' desktops - i.e. a completely separate screen which your mouse moves over too as it exits one screen (the drivers allow you to virtually position screens as they are physically arranged so if a screen is to the left you go left to get to it etc) or you can have clone displays e.g. for rear DVd use you may want both screens the same - but as confused suggested a vga splitter will do this so you could possibly get away with just the 3 output matrox.

There are people who know a lot more than me on multi-monitor forums, i have only dabbled with 3. But you are gonna have to do a power budget to work out what you need to power it all.

Hope this helps

Andy

Hope this helps

FunkDaMonkMan

I am seeing a fair amount of mis-information in this thread.

Here is what i think you computer system should be similiar to the following:

2 monitor outputs both split. (you don't need 4 sepearate desktop spaces. If you want to show a movie, it could only be on one screen. If you have 2 outputs split, then you can show the movie on 2 screens). You need two touchscreens and 2 regular screens.

Motherboard - EP-8RGMI (has dual screen outputs) I am currently using this board and it is great.

Processor - Barton 2600. $90 at www.newegg.com. Fast processor... for a good price.

RAM - 256meg of crucial. www.crucial.com

Hard Drive - Probably around 160gb. More or less depending on your storage needs.

Optical Drive - either a 16x slot load DVD drive. What else?

Power supply - Opus 150W This should run this system.

Sound Card - I would skip the Sound Blaster Series and go to something professional. many cards have full sized RCA outputs

Total cost - approx $550 plus screens and sound card.

Chlorine

He's dead on about the movie only playing on display output at a time. Even with a dualhead card, due to the movie decoding being done by hardware it can only be used on one output.

I think you mentioned using 3 screens for general entertainment and one for GPS, to do this I'd suggest a dualhead card, and then splitting one output to the three entertainment screens, and the second output to the gps screen.

As far as having a friend plot out a course on the GPS while you cue up some music, I don't think that will work. Since the touch screens work like mice, the PC can only recognize the input from one at a time without getting confused, if you tried using both at the same time the cursor would move eratically. Try hooking up two mice on one pc, it will see both, but if you move both at the same time it will confuse it. So basically you can have both connected, but only touch one at a time.

Depending on the drivers and software packaged with the cards, there are settings for window/application position memory, use this when setting up your screens, and it will remember that the GPS comes up on the GPS screen.

siding

Do you have problems with roofing? Looking for quality roofing? roofing philadelphia may help you

Scouse Monkey

WTF!!!!!! BAN HIM!

__________________
If you want more answers on anything I have posted you can find me at digital-car.co.uk

or skiing or diving or doing somthing else fun!

mp3oplecarrier

RANDOM! or what?

__________________
....Yes, I know it has a stupid name, those crazy Japanese!

DarquePervert

Since the thread has already been resurrected by some spammer....

Since he lives in the Bay Area, I'd be more willing to bet it's Lake Tahoe/Truckee area.

And I don't think the spam was completely random. There's someone who posted to this thread that's in Wilkes Barr, PA. That's not horribly far from Philadelphia....

__________________

MP3Car.com