Turning My Mac Pro Into A Three Headed Beast

A few months back I made a post regarding my SGI 1600SW flatscreen display. It had been sitting mostly dormant as part of my SGI O2 setup for years, so I decided to get it working with my P4-based Shuttle running Ubuntu and XP. I dropped in the GFX-1600SW board I spoke of in that earlier post and everything came together as I’d hoped. Good times.

Not long after, I had cause to clear off some desk space for a new arrival in the Byte Cellar (that’s another story – stay tuned!), so I moved the Shuttle setup to my main workspace, right next to my Mac Pro. The 1600SW fit nicely and I grabbed a tiny Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2 to go with it. A slick setup. I came to realize, however, that it just sat there sad and dark most of the time, since the Shuttle doesn’t see that much use. And then it dawned on me…

All I needed was a second graphics card to put this screen to use as a third display for my Mac Pro. I even had a two-way DVI KVM lying around unused, so the Mac and Shuttle could share the display. How geekily wonderful! A trip to eBay and a few days later I was sliding a GeForce 7300 GT into slot 1 on the Mac Pro. I wired it all up and — shazaam! My desk now looks like something out of The Matrix.

I grabbed some video (above) of the three headed beast going crazy with a little wrap-around iTunes visualization goodness. I definitely opened a can of badass on my Mac Pro with this little exercise. Good times.

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3 Responses to Turning My Mac Pro Into A Three Headed Beast

  1. Mathue says:

    Suhweeeet :)

  2. Tom says:

    I was about to ask how you got iTunes to spread the visualizer across all the monitors, but I figured it out. Universal Access and the Zoom function :)

    But I’m still wondering what those blue displays underneath the main screen are…

  3. Pingback: The SGI 1600SW Flat-Panel Display Saga - Byte Cellar

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