[JFischel]

All,

Does anyone have any experience dual-heading their Intel iMacs? I have a 20 Inch iMac and am thinking about picking up a 20 Apple display thanks to a rather generous employee purchase program with my company.

Curious to know what experiences people have had...

Thanks!

Josh

[stefanicotine]

It's amazing. I've been doing it since February with mine and can never go back. Even better, wall mount the Cinema Display! It looks so nice. Unfortunately all I have is a 19" Acer, but I might be picking up a 20" Samsung 205bw soon (If you don't buy a Cinema Display then make sure you buy a monitor with height adjustment). Don't forget to pick up a mini-DVI to DVI adapter. You need that to connect the monitor.

As far as using the setup, it's flawless. I won't even begin to describe it, you just have to see for yourself. If you have the 128mb ATI card then I don't know how it will run with another 20". I've heard that with dual displays OS X splits up your video ram between the two monitors, but unless you're playing games I don't think that would be a problem.

Here's what my dual monitor setup looks like:

[hickey]

damn that looks sick.

I cant wait until I squirrel away enough cash for an iMac and a second display. I'll be living large then.

[Gossamer]

The games I've seen will black out both displays then activate the one it will use, so I think gaming would be okay. Halo would take a noticeable hit on my iBook going from 32MB -> 16MB if it really was splitting the VRAM, but it plays fine.

[stefanicotine]

Originally Posted by Gossamer

The games I've seen will black out both displays then activate the one it will use, so I think gaming would be okay. Halo would take a noticeable hit on my iBook going from 32MB -> 16MB if it really was splitting the VRAM, but it plays fine.

Yeah, I have no idea where I heard that. I think it was at the onmac.net forums. Anyways, it doesn't really matter, seeing as how most of us play our games in Windows and, like Gossamer said, it blanks out the external screen.

[ael719]

where'd u get the awesome wallpaper?

Dual monitors is cool, but knowing myself I'd probably just use one monitor and forget about the other one. I still plan on getting 2 monitors anways...

[quangdiggity]

I bought a 20" Apple Cinema Display to pair with my iMac core duo 17" about two weeks ago and am loving it. I have a 23" Cinema at my office and I think I prefer the dual head setup to a large single head setup. Somehow, the extra space at the top and bottom of the screen on the 23" just don't get used by me. I prefer having lots of windows open side-by-side, and dual head is definitely the way to go for that.

I haven't noticed any performance degradation in my daily use. I don't play games, so I can't comment on that. The only thing that bothers me is that when I use Front Row to play a movie, it will play full screen on the primary display and blank the other screen, but the backlight stays on.

[stefanicotine]

Originally Posted by ael719

where'd u get the awesome wallpaper?

Well, funny thing, you'll find that it's almost impossible to find any pictures of a girl laying across two monitors. I have searched for hours if not days and to no avail. So I went to skins.be and got a 1920x1200 version of this wallpaper. I then cropped and enlarged to 3360x1050 and spent hours cleaning up the grain and pixelation. Sounds like it would look gross I know, but it turned out VERY nicely. I then cropped it in half and saved as separate files.

Originally Posted by ael719

Dual monitors is cool, but knowing myself I'd probably just use one monitor and forget about the other one. I still plan on getting 2 monitors anways...

I thought the same, and it does take some getting used to, but now I'm wishing the iMac had room for two external monitors instead of just one

[iRussel]

I totally agree with the loving two monitors. I didn't know if I would use the second one but now I couln't go back to just one monitor.

[ajprice]

I'm thinking of an iMac and second screen for my next Mac, probably a Dell screen so I can plug the game console in and have that on the second screen when I'm not on the Mac.

stefanicotine, any chance of linking your wallpaper images?

[stefanicotine]

Why not, I'm feeling generous

Left: http://www.sighness.com/images/sarahconnorleft.png
Right: http://www.sighness.com/images/sarahconnorleft.png

If you want the original then go to www.skins.be and take a peek through the Sarah Connor gallery. It's in there somewhere.