£400 for Monitor and GFX card

mart981

mart981

mart981

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My 19" CRT is slowly dying and I think I'm finally going to enter the LCD market. I've read a lot about LCD's in the monitors section of the forum but still mildly clueless tbh.

I have a budget of £400 I'm willing to spend, at the moment I have a X1950 Pro 512mb card and it handles most of the new games on medium settings with the odd extra bumped up at 1280x1024, so it will probably struggle at higher resolutions.

I haven't even decided between a 8800GT or the slightly cheaper 3870. So I need soem suggestions. The quality of the monitor must be good though so it's a matter of finding the right balance.

On my first browse through the shop I was tempted by

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3870 XT 512MB GDDR4 £129.99 (£152.74)
Dell Ultrasharp 2007WFP 20" £209.99 (£246.74)
TOTAL £399.48 inc VAT

Then I thought why not get a 24" monitor and break the budget by £20

NEC AccuSync® LCD24WMCX 24" £229.99 (£270.24)
OcUK Value L2442W 24" £229.99 (£270.24)

So I think my choice is between the 3870 and a lower end 24" monitor or a slightly better gfx card - 8800GT and a 20" monitor.

Any and all suggestions welcome!
 
I'm surprised by your jump from a Dell to a Value monitor. I'd suggest something like the 22" LGs you can get for just under £200 and combine that with a 8800 GTS 512Mb GFX card.

Should be about bang on budget.
 
Whilst reading up on the LCD's I got the impression that the image on the 22" were not as sharp compared to the 20"ers because they used the same resolution.

Is that not much of a disadvantge then? Otherwise yeah I would definitely look at the 22" screens.
 
the ocuk value monitor is definately not a 'lower end' 24", its better then a lot of the other 24"'s
 
Lower "price" end then :)

So if I go for the 24" OcUK I'd have to go for the OcUK 3870 to get near my budget.

Obviously it's not going to be able to run (as in 60fps) Crysis at that res, with aa or af on anyway, but will it be able to handle high settings for other current games?

If so I could go for:

OcUK ATI Radeon HD 3870 XT 512MB GDDR4 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - £114.99 (£135.11)
OcUK Value L2442W 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor - £229.99 (£270.24)

Total £417.04
 
Damn that looks tasty so I'll probably have that, if I'm quick enough, with a EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and I'll be good to go?

Or a GT? or save a little money and get a 3870? I don't plan on upgrading again until next year probably, the gfx and monitor anyway :p

Are the new GTS' are back on top of the GT's now? If so I may aswell get the best card I can find for about £180-190.

edit: Ordered the monitor anyway :)
 
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