Not long ago I made the purchase of two 19" LCD monitors for the my rig. With the addition of two new monitors to the family that meant that there would be one extra. After a while I deiced to use it as a third display to increase my desktop space and what not. But after installing the video card I purchased to run the third display I found out that X11 and Nvidia don’t play nice together with more than two displays, that is unless you have two video cards with the same series GPU (I have a 6600 and the new one was a 5200). So After about two weeks of trying to come up with a way to fix this so that all three displays would place nice together, I have given up. I found several little posts on the internet about patching X11 so that it will work with three monitors, that being two of them playing with nvidia and one X does. But I have come to the decision that I will just make a MythBox and use the third display as a new HD tv like setup.

At the time I also have a nice server setting in my room that only shares files, runs MySQL, subversion, and is my test bed for my work in rails. So why not toss a capture card and my 5200 into it and use it as a TV? the capture card really doesn’t have to be much simply because I have a TiVO so it only needs to have a way to get the signal. So I’m planing on this nice little upgrade to cost me anywhere from $20 to $200 depending on whether or not I decide to get a nice big old HDD to put in it as well.