[alialkhatib]

I went more or less with option 2 (a pair of 4K monitors) and "drive" them with a hackintosh I bought/built for that purpose. At the time I had a 2012 rMBP, which didn't offer MiniDP 1.2/Thunderbolt 2, and driving just one of these monitors is more than a little resource-intensive. It was relatively expensive compared to not buying anything more than the monitors, but cheaper than buying a whole new laptop to drive all those pixels.

It's also nice to be able to upgrade that desktop relatively easily, tap into a more performant computer when my laptop's not up to snuff (but the problem's not quite big enough to justify spinning up EC2 instances or using some university resources), and plug in/unplug essentially with an ethernet cable (to mitigate the latency issues of on-campus wifi) rather than deal with a mess of cables.

I actually have 3 monitors (2x4K and a 1080p display), so all of the MiniDP ports and the HDMI port would've gotten taken up, leaving me just with USB, which would've been somewhat frustrating (yes, a shortcoming of the laptop, but one I accept). This way I still have my HDMI port and a Thunderbolt port available (and I have ethernet, arguably somewhat faster than the available wifi, as a nice side effect).

It's not necessarily perfectly ideal - perfect might be something like monitors that connect wirelessly, certainly without a second machine running in the background - but having a pair of 4K monitors in portrait/vertical orientation is so pleasant that it totally overwhelms any lingering misgivings or doubts about whether it's worth it. I can put myself in Bandt's shoes where he says that he didn't really like having 2 or 3 monitors, but for me that awkwardness was only temporary.