Monitory goodness

[Wol]

Thought this is a better place than none to ask:

After getting my spangly desktop last december, Ive now decided that one screen is annoyingly: not enough.

so i'm tempted to buy a 1920 * 1280 (or whatever that res is) monitor over summer with a little bit of money ive earnt. Ive currently got the 20 inch dell 1680*1050 one which im happy with, and I generally trust dell monitors, so am tempted to go with the e248fp (linky)24 inch dell screen.

I'm mainly going to be playing games, doing video editing / animation and watching videos on it.

Does anyone have any other suggestions of monitors theyve had had success with, and something for not extortionate amount of money (as much as id love the 2500*2000ish 30 inch monitor! mmm)

Also:i currently have 2 gigs of ram, and run 32 bit XP (dont laugh at me ). If i stick up to 4 gigs in, im going to get smacked with the whole "4gigs under xp failing" thing. Whats the best suggestion to up the lovelyness? Install XP 64bit and stick in a chunk more memory? if so, how much would people suggest? (and no. vista is not an option before its suggested )

Anyhoo. comments and suggestions on a postcard... well... you could just reply to the thread, but postcards are more fun!

thanks in advance

 

[DeZmond]

I can second your feelings about Dell monitors - I have a 22" widescreen dell (also 1680x1050) and it's been fantastic, no problems at all with it. I know that Haven has/had a 24" Dell screen (that I recall producing no small amount of envy from the regulars of the day ), so perhaps he could provide some insight into working with a 24" 1920x1200 setup?

Also, speaking as someone who has Vista on the desktop and XP on my laptop, while I will be the first to admit I use my laptop more than my desktop, the good ol' desk monster is more of a media-center hub for me now than ever before, and in this regard Vista is actually not bad- using Media Center on Vista isn't actually that painful and the graphics do look quite nice. Yes, compatibility is a shocking nightmare but since you can run XP in a virtual machine (using microsoft's own --free-- Virtual PC application, a decent virtualisation-supporting processor will give you half decent performance for any apps refusing to run in Vista.)

Anyway, just some food for thought.

 

[Iron_fist]

i believe it is samsung who do a nice 1920x1200 24" widescreen that comes in around the £260 mark.

with RAM personally i have a 1GB kit and a 2GB kit in my machine so am avoiding the 4GB limit on XP. the difference is maybe 1FPS in high end games, though at £15 for a 1GB kit and ~£30 for 2GB the choice is yours.

 

[Haven]

I've used two screens a lot at work, I'd strongly suggest getting matching ones.

Other than that its down to how much you're willing to spend

If money was no object I'd have one (or possibly two) of these

 

[Haven]

24 inch dell screen;

The Good: Vast amounts of desk real estate, very cheap for what you get, lots of inputs (a very good thing imo).
The Bad: Slight motion blur (unfortunately I'm very sensitive to it), also color balance is crap and you'll have to play with it a bit to make the colors work as you'd like.

The only photo I have online is this one.

Overall I'd say it was a very good purchase 2 years ago when 24" was just coming out. If I were purchasing now I would be looking very hard at LED back-lit panels and nothing else.

 

[Wol]

Thanks for the replies so far guys.

Dezmond: If anything, I'd use VMWare rather than virtual PC, as I already have the installers for it, and I've had more happyness with VMWare than MSVPC.

Iron_Fist: I was tempted by the +1 gig option. I'm happy enough with fps rates (I only play TF2, and happily get 60fps with all the settings on the higest possible (although dunno what a higher res monitor will do to that! ). The main things I'd be hoping for is to up the amount of fast number crunchingness on stuff like raytracing, rendering video and suchlike. Give After Effects a bit more memory and it might be a bit happier!

Haven: When you mention 'matching screens', do you mean manufacturer, size, contrast ratio, combination of the above? The current dell I have is 800:1 contrast, and the e248 is 1000:1 so not too much diff there. If I was more awake, I'd work out the difference in dot pitch between the two, but im tired! .

Also, my girlfriend asks: "why 'goat boy'" !

 

[Wol]

Wol bought a new monitor, along with a new hard drive (which he installed vista on), and he also now has 6GB of ram.

Wol enjoys his new 24 inch monitor muchly.

Ta for the advice guys!

And the two monitors match up nicely