So, I've finally decided to pull the trigger on a new PC for home/office/entertainment. I will therefore be scouring the local PC emporia for a Lian-Li PC-A77B... the rest of the parts I'm not so sure about, other than a proper Core i7, lots of RAM, a brace of Radeon HD 5970s, and a couple more Dell 2408WFPs. Oh, and an Intel SSD.
Any motherboard/RAM/PSU recommendations would be much appreciated. HDD recommendations would be good, as well. I'm thinking 16-channel SATA RAID card, and I'll just add a few 2TB drives or so with each month's paycheck.
My main questions are as follows, in no particular order:
1. Does anyone know whether it is possible to run a triple-head monitor setup (all as one display surface) and a projector (as a different display surface) together at the same time, i.e. movie on the projector, normal work/porn on the other three screens?
2. To keep the living room quiet and uncluttered, and to be able to use the study as a study, I'm going to need to run sound, video, and several patch cables (for networking, serial communications, et cetera) from my study to the living room - probably through the air conditioning ducts, as it's a rented apartment. At a guess, I'd say the distance will be around 50 feet, less to the projector, more to the surround sound box. I think that's probably pushing it for HDMI, and definitely pushing it for SPDIF/TOSLINK (I'll be running the RS232 over STP Cat5). Does anyone have any experience with stuff like this? My projector seems quite prone to sparklies or just not syncing up right if it doesn't like the cable, for what it's worth.
3. Are BD drives worth getting yet?
4. Are there any gamer-ish soundcards with balanced outputs yet?
5. Does anyone have any experience with the Lian-Li PC-A77? Good, bad, or ugly? In particular, I'd like to fit a slimline optical drive in the top in place of that ugly fan monitor thing.
I'm sure I'll have plenty more questions later, but thanks very much for reading this far. Have some
in advance.
