The new monitor

[Sheekel]

Looking for a new monitor, finally upgrading from my old 17" CRT. Have an 8800GT, so dont want anything above 22" for risk of low FPS at high resolutions.

Any recommendations? Stories? Brands to stay away from?

[MidKnight]

an 8800gt can handle a 24" just fine!

my Radeon hd 4870 gets ~50 fps on my 26" monitor at 1920x1200


As for brand, imo Westinghouse has the best price/size ratio for a name brand atm. HP monitors look bigger than they actually are, Samsung monitors apparently have good quality (No personal experience >_> dont go on my word and buy a samsung monitor and yell at me if it sux )

[imbaczek]

all i know is that brands almost don't matter, since the most important part, the liquid crystal matrix, is produced in only a few fabs around the world.

go to some review site anyway.

[aegis]

if you're in a constantly dark area, don't get a matte screen, get a glossy one.

imho 22" is a waste, since you can get a 20" with the same resolution (1680x1050)

[Sheekel]

imho 22" is a waste, since you can get a 20" with the same resolution (1680x1050)

I may sound a bit foolish, but doesnt having a wider screen = bigger viewing area? Or is the viewing area dependent entirely on resolution...

IE player with 22" can see better/more in CS:S than person with 20"

[CarRepairer]

.

[[Krogoth86]]

The most important issue most certainly is your field of use for it. If you do graphical stuff you can dump the entire TN class monitors for good . If that's not important you can go ahead and take a TN panel for your new monitor and be happy to be able to buy the cheapest (in terms of price) type as for good visuals on your screen you need either a IPS or VA panel type which cost quite a tad more but simply are way better in terms of color range, displaying "exact" colors, deep black, viewing angles and so on...

When choosing the screen size there pretty much are just three widespread sizes to choose from: 19", 22" and 24 or 26". As widescreens have become quite popular you'll find most of them being widescreens which is good except for 19" screens as you'll pretty much just get a wider 17" screen which I wouldn't recommend. That's also why 20" is dying out for quite a while - 22" can be produced for about the same today and the pixels per surface ratio is a bit more comfortable here as the amount of pixels is pretty much the same. When it comes to 24 to 26" screens I become rather sceptic - they are a horror if you want to stay up to date game wise as their 1920+ resolutions pretty much force you to buy a new graphics card like every year if you want to keep playing at high quality. At the same time especially for the 26"+ and even more especially for IPS/VA panels you get to a point where you are faced with a quite high price increase and for graphics artists it in most cases makes more sense to buy two 19" screens, use them in dual screen mode plus being able to play at 1280x1024 at one of em plus avoiding things like high Input-Lag the very large TFTs (just VA/IPS) suffer from. While this sounds rather bad for those panel types imo when reaching 26" and more TNs aren't a much better solution as you often just have to move your head a little bit to start seeing color changes due to the rather low viewing angles which some people find annoying...

When it comes to recommending a special model - well there are so many out there and so many of them are pretty good. Monitors by Chimei seem to me as the best TNs around as although that brand was rather new to me they always surpassed "classics" like BenQ or Samsung a little bit. When it comes to VA monitors I tend to recommend Eizo. They're rather expensive but good plus Eizo gives you a 5-year warranty on most of the monitors parts which makes the price rather good than bad (although double check if that's worldwide like that with Eizos)...

Last but not least there is the choice between glare and non-glare displays. While I think it's horrific that it's hard to get a fast Notebook without glare screen it's rather ok for normal monitors as that "boom" hasn't overwhelmed the entire sector (yet). It might not be as grave as for Notebooks as you can plan in which environment you work but still: Glare is more exhausting when not working in a totally dark environment which means -> night. You of course can put the brightness very high as monitors can reach very high values here but the downside is: It will hurt your eyes / lead to headaches. So my opinion is that it's not worth the rather little advantages when it sucks using it when wearing a white shirt for example...

[Sheekel]

Think I'm going to go with this one, has lots of great reviews and is pretty cheap, LG seems like a quality product:

http://canadacomputers.com/index.php?do ... cid=MT.282

[1v0ry_k1ng]

make sure you check the companies policy on returns due to dead pixels. I got a samsung monitor because any dead pixels--> full refund
some companies, they allow for up to four dead pixels before they will refund you, which is bullshit

[[Krogoth86]]

Well I don't know if there have been local conditions but despite a special action on a certain monitor I know of (was some time ago though) Samsung keeps selling its TFTs under pixel error class II like everyone else does...

[ZellSF]

My first LCD monitor was about a year ago, a 24" TN monitor I got as a temporary monitor because there were no good non-TN alternatives, but TN viewing angles were just too horrible so I recently got a HP LP2475w, which is the best non-TN 24" gaming monitor you can get today, but it still has too many flaws for me to consider it anything but a temporary monitor.

I hate LCDs.

Edit: also a 8800 GT is (probably) good enough for 24", unless you're going to play Crysis, in which case I suggest you keep your current monitor and run at 640x480.