Over the years, I gradually moved from one monitor, to 2 and finally 3. Because of what I do, I always felt like I couldn’t have enough programs opened at the same time. And even with the gradual upgrades, I just wanted more (shocker). There are times when I have Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and several browsers open and I hate having to minimize one program in order to see another to so that I can test something.
Another reason for this upgrade was that I wanted 2 vertical monitors. Although I’ll do design and both photo and video editing primarily on the horizontal monitors, when I write code, or if I’m reading something, the vertical orientation is great.
I tend to do a lot of research before making a purchasing decision so after spending weeks reading reviews and checking out prices I compiled this list:
When researching monitor stands for my 6-monitor system the most important factor for me was sturdiness. This is a large setup and I just couldn’t afford to use flimsy monitor stands that I would constantly worry about. Please note that the names of the mounts are confusing. You use the horizontal mount for vertical monitors, and the vertical mount for horizontal vertical ones.
I used the Atdec VFS-DV Visidec Dual Vertical Freestanding Desk Mount for the 4 horizontally-mounted monitors.
I used the Atdec VFS-DV Visidec Dual Horizontal Freestanding Desk Mount for the 2 vertically-mounted monitors.
Please let me know if you have any questions about this 6 monitor setup or if you have any suggestions as to how it could be made better.
Thanks for the great tutorial along with the buys guide. I’m looking at putting up a similar design. The foot-print you have is perfect for my work environment. The one drawback for me is, I’m working from a docked laptop hence installing that nifty video card is a no go for me… I’ll keep looking, but again thanks for sharing.
Let me know what you end up finding
Doesn’t the Dell onboard graphics support 2 monitors? So you’d really only need a video card that can drive 4 monitors?
Hi, if you want to add a second card, yes.
I got this working a slightly different way which is slightly cheaper (but more power hungry).
I got 2 x Gigabyte Radeon 6870 cards for $25/card. Each card supports 5 displays but I connected 3 to each, and that did the trick.
Unfortunately I could not merge all displays to act as a single display but that’s alright as that wasn’t the intention for having 6 monitors.