Dual LCD monitor vs One Widescreen LCD

I was able to find a research paper on Multi-Screen monitors and productivity on the net:
http://www.utah.edu/rockymountain/Issue_Two.pdf#page=33

I am interested in any study on the advantages of a single widescreen LCD monitor versus dual regular aspect ratio LCD monitors.

If you are not aware of any study or reasearch paper but have first hand experience with both preferably using Pro/E and/or Intralink please feel free to post your comments/opinions.

I tried two monitors a couple of years ago and sometimes the cursor would stick on the second monitor. I was using a vp990 wildcat with 512 ram and two viewsonic g90 monitors. It was a nice setup but I would go with the single widescreen if given the choice, especially on our automotive projects.


miked

Personally love my 24" widescreen setup. People who use dual screens swear by them but they put a lot of demands on the graphics card. Definately need a higher end card with more RAM to handle dual screens.

You get more "bang for the buck" with dual screens. Just make a calculation on the number of (real hardware = native resolution) pixels you get for the money you pay. Add to this that my typical setup leaves only 56% of the screen area to work in and you know you need as much pixels as you can get. And it's a pity to waste expensive screen area on something trivial as an icon.


Have a 22" CRT at home running 1600x1200, which still is the best deal IMHO. That's a full 46% larger than my job setup.


Alex

I used twin 21" CRT monitors in my previous job and I would swear by them. Currently using twin 19" monitors. 128MB graphics cards running 2560x1024 resolution. Driver version is critical. Some work better than others, newer is not necessarily better.

I use nView to limit Pro/E to maximising in the left hand monitor and typically run model tree (since 2000i) undocked in the right monitor which is brilliant for serious model tree editting. Also you can spread out the really big family tables over both monitors

The second monitor is also great for having pdf drawings of manufacturers datasheets open while modelling the components in Pro/E


DB

Dual monitors are the only way to go. With a single monitor you will have to pan through different open windows. With dual monitors you just throw one window over to the other screen. I would never go back to a single monitor

Another advantage of a second monitor is when you occasionally have to do really major surgery on a component and have many features to re-route because you had to change/remove a base feature that had many children.

You can start up a second session of Pro/E in the second monitor and load in the previous version of the model to use as a guide to determine where lost references should be re-routed to.

Also assembling small components into BIG assemblies is easier when the new component is in it's own window on the second monitor so there is no chance of it dropping behind the main window.


DB


Edited by: Dell_Boy

Hi guys!


How to setup dual monitor? My machine is IBM Intellistation Mpro with 2 output of monitor.But I haven`t tried to use a second monitor at all. Is it possible to move a window in to the second monitor and the first one use for Pro/E window?


Best regards!


NDK

Dual monitors all the way. I couldn't go back. I would even rather have two 17"'ers than one 21". I reference so many different applications that Pro/E is on one and Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook/web/pdf/MathCAD/Allegro/AutoCAD on the other.


As far as 2 vs. 1 grande... other guys here have the 24" Wide Dell, and they like it, but I know some who would rather have two of them, which could be overkill. And like someone said you get much more bang for your buck 2 smaller screens.


Just make sure you get nVidia, trust me, we've done aLOT of testing... there's no comparison when it comes to real world use.


bg
Edited by: bgoettler

> but they put a lot of demands on the graphics card.
> Definately need a higher end card with more RAM to handle
> dual screens.

No, no, NO!

Video RAM is mostly only used as a fast buffer cache to store textures in games and such. We don't use textures in MCAD, and even those who does probably only use a megabyte worth of it.

VRAM is also used for buffring the output to the screen, but even if you use twin 20" at 1600x1200 with 32-bit color, you only need less than 16 MB.

The amount of RAM on a CAD graphics card is IRRELEVANT with anything like 32 MB and above. Unless you are doing flashy presentations using a lot of textures, in which case you probably don't use Pro/E Wildfire.

What you DO need however, is a fast geometry accelerator. That would be a part of the GPU on the vidcard chip, not the VRAM, so the MHz the GPU is running at is interesting while the VRAM speed and amount is not.

As for dual screens - there is one issue that is important: the technology for this features two ways of operation.

One is where the graphics card sees the screens as two halves of a total. This means that your OS thinks the workspace is something like 3200x1200 wide. This is inconvenient, as it causes windows to span over the border and most popups appear in the middle, split by the monitor bezels. Nasty.

The other requires an extra driver component and it splits the screen into two, like 2x1600x1200, and program windows behave accordingly. If you click "maximize" they will only fill one screen. Popups appear in the middle of one screen or the other, depending. Much better.

However - the software implementation of how this works differ.

I had an ATI card and I didn't like at all how it owuld first span both screens and then shrink the window to fit one. I also got extra window buttons added to clutter the interface.

Then I switched to a nVidia card and it is much better, although many programs tend to only work on one screen and not the other. One program works on one screen but opens all right-click menus on the other. Annoying.

I don't know how it works on Matrox' and 3DLabs' cards, and I don't care to learn either. Old experience says that Matrox probably put a lot of care into the drivers, wheras 3DLabs paid a student to do it.

Recently I was set up touse dual monitors with an nVidia Quadro FX1300. Now,I could not imagine working without them.One thing that makes dual monitors very helpful is that when copying features or huge patterns or feature groups from one model to another, you can have each model in its own full-size window on its own monitor.It works beautifully -- it is much easier to see reference highlights this way. However, I still use wf1 and with dual monitorsit crasheswhen I open the model appearance dialogue to change model colors etc.To get around this, Iopen the display settings and disable the second monitor until I have finished setting the model appearance. Is this fixed in later versions?