Is my setup possible?

[spotdog14]

So I got this grand idea to attempt to build the perfect bowl game setup in my basement this holiday season. My wife has given me a $200 limit to do this.

Equipment I already have:
(1) Dell 2405WFP monitor
(1) Sharp 32" 720p TV
(1) Circa 2005 gaming rig
(1) Unfinished 800 sq basement at my disposal

Equipment I purchased today:
(2) Dell 1707FPV monitors
(3) Monoprice adjustable LCD mounts
(1) Comcast HD Cable box

So here is my idea. I mount the 32 inch tv half way up the wall and I hook the cable box up to that so I can obviously watch cable in HD. Alright, tv taken care of.

Next I am thinking about below that mounting the two 17 inch monitors and hooking them up to my old gaming rig and using that to watch ESPN3.com. I will then mount the 24inch dell monitor below that right above the component cabinet also run off of the old gaming rig to watch internet streaming (or from my slingbox).

Does this setup seem doable? I also have a PS3 that I can either hook up to the 32 inch tv or the 24 inch monitor which will be nice, I'm sure my wife will love getting that out of the living room. My old gaming rig is pretty good, its a P4 3.2Ghz with 8 gigs of RAM and some ATI video card thats got a gig of on board RAM. The only thing I can see being an issue is I only have 2 outputs on my video card so ill have to pick up something soon to power the third monitor unless I use something else to power it.

Here is a sexy diagram I came up with.

Any comments or opinions would be awesome, thanks!

Oh and I am going to build the wall out of 2x4 and either plywood or go all out and drywall it.

 

[spotdog14]

Things I learned last night...

My old gaming rig sucks compared to my Precision M4600 laptop.
My wife sole the nice monitor and gave me the one that is very warm in color.

And thats about it.

It was the first time I had turned on my old computer since 2008 and amazingly everything fired up and ran like a champ. I am going to install Win7 on it this weekend and see if that helps any, hopefully it will with the video playback.

My plan B is to get an advanced e-port dock for my m4600 and run all three monitors off of that since I know it can do it.

I also have a question for you guys. How should I setup the cable and PS3? I was originally thinking about doing the cable to the actual 32 inch tv and the PS3 to the 24 inch monitor but it got me thinking that it might be nice to be able to play the PS3 on the 24 inch while a game is going on on the other tv so I am thinking about either getting an HDMI splitter or just running another HDMI cable and manually switching it in the back.

Anyways I also changed the layout, here is how I think I am going to mount it now.

 

[rhansen5_99]

Seeing as how the two 1707FPV are 1280X1024 resolution the 2405WFP is 1900x1200 and I assume the tv is 1366X768, I would think your best bet to make everything look clean on the monitors would be to have the tv on top, then the other three in a line below but rotate the 1707fpv's 90 degrees so that you are matching up the 1024X1280 1920x1200 to 1024X1280, then in theory assuming you gaming rig is bearable you could get an elcheapo AMD card (think like amd 5000 series maybe used) that supports eyefinity (does that p4 box have pcie?) and setup a single display group that will almost match on the bottom. Maybe pickup a tvtuner (cheap) for the desktop and you could run something on top and on bottom independently assuming your cable has unencrypted qam, you could split off before the coax to the cable box and run two sets of feeds.

Check out monoprice.com for some good low cost mount options.

 

[valve1138]

Tell your wife you're going to spend $2000 and buy a projector.

 

[westrock2000]

I don't have experience with HDMI splitters, but I would check online to make sure they will work with a PS3. While HDMI's most obvious benefit to the consumer is the small form factor, the real reason it was developed was so that both the video and audio could be securely locked to the source device and the display device. Copyright holders didn't want you, the end user, to be able to do nefarious things with their intellectual property.

So using a standard "Y" cable kind of goes against the idea of having a secure channel. Not saying its not going to work in all scenarios of source devices and displays, but just look around and read reviews. Look for "HDCP" support, and it will prbably have to be an active splitter.

 

[westrock2000]

PS, I'm amazed you have 8GB of ram on a 32 bit processor Or not a "classic" P4?

 

[spotdog14]

Alright, a little update. I had to scrap the P4, it couldn't handle multiple ESPN3 streams. I ended up using my work M4600 laptop and another spare Latitude I had. Anyways here is what it looked like at the end.