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Graphics Card (Approx £100)
- Thread starter adam1v
- Start date
It might be 1360x768 or 1920x1080.
With 1360x768 then I'd get the 8800GT. If it's 1920x1080 then the GTX would be the best buy.
I take it you have a 22" LCD for your PC?. If so and your Plasma is the lower resolution the the GT is a great choice and is the cheapest.
Ah cool.
Well I'd only upgrade your screens if you felt you needed to. If you're happy then there's no point really. The 8800GT will be good enough for your 19" screens as it would be for 22". The only problem here though is the new AMD/ATI 4xxx series you're waiting on. If today's 8800GTX/Ultra, X2 3870 and the 9800GX2 are a little bit wasted at 1680x1050 then how choked will the 4xxx series card from AMD/ATI be at this resolution if it's faster than the cards I've just mentioned and for ATI's sake it has to be faster?.
So would maybe keeping your two 19" screens be a possibility so you can happily use Photoshop/Dreamweaver like you're used to and maybe buying a 24" screen around the time you're thinking about getting the new 4 series card?. This way you have time to save now, things will get cheaper (LCD screens) and the 8800GT will urinate all over any game you throw at it (bar Crysis) on your 19" screens
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No, I'm saying that if 1680x1050 would be a bottleneck for the new cards then you'll need higher than a 22" as that's the resolution for that size of screen. That's why I suggested that you save up for a new screen around the time you are going to buy the 4xxx series ATI card. So you'd have the let's say 24" to game on and could still use your twin 19" for your Photoshop/Dreamweaver work. That would mean a lot of messing around though as the new card will have 2 DVI outputs most likely
.I wouldn't worry about it now though. Wait to see what the new card is capable of doing until you make a decision on what you want. If the new card (ATI 4 series) runs games amazingly at higher resolutions than 1680x1050 then it looks like you need to get a bigger screen than 22" or the ATI 4xxx series might be getting wasted. Benchmarks will show you what you need to know when the time comes and within that time screens will become cheaper.
J.D, thanks for all your help so far, im nearly done lol.
Lets say I dont want to go any bigger than 22" (i dont think i have the room), and lets say I've just been given a few hundred pound as a tax rebate, which dual 22" monitor would you recommend for gaming?
The Samsung SM-226BW 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor look very impressive, a quality brand, high contrast and low ms, would you agree these are very good?
Lets say I dont want to go any bigger than 22" (i dont think i have the room), and lets say I've just been given a few hundred pound as a tax rebate
, which dual 22" monitor would you recommend for gaming?The Samsung SM-226BW 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor look very impressive, a quality brand, high contrast and low ms, would you agree these are very good?
*edit* im gobsmacked lol, searching for best 22" gaming monitor this monitor is in the first 10 links, I think this must be a good bet.
Whats the gaming likely to be on a widescreen of this size? am I likely to notice problems in BF2/CS/WoW etc playing games which are not designed for widescreen?
Whats the gaming likely to be on a widescreen of this size? am I likely to notice problems in BF2/CS/WoW etc playing games which are not designed for widescreen?
Last edited:
Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 37,804
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lets just say i enjoy BF2 etc WS on my 26" Samsung LCD TV, lower res than that TFT but larger surface area. Yes you need to add a commandline tag to BF2 shortcut to get Widescreen.
But just go widescreen it is worth it,
But just go widescreen it is worth it,
J.D, thanks for all your help so far, im nearly done lol.
Lets say I dont want to go any bigger than 22" (i dont think i have the room), and lets say I've just been given a few hundred pound as a tax rebate
The Samsung SM-226BW 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor look very impressive, a quality brand, high contrast and low ms, would you agree these are very good?
Don't worry lol. I'm not pulling my hair out with every post I see 
.Ahh when it comes to LCD screens then I'm no use. I bought one for £220 odd s and sold it for £30 2 or 3 months later to a m8. I hated it. Even my other m8's 24" BenQ FP241 was slower than my screen and his was over 3 times the price. I love playing first person shooters and I need a screen with no response time and that's why I reverted back to CRT but went with a Viewsonic monitor and I couldn't be happier.
Anyway. From the 2 screens you've asked about I can only go on looks alone as the specifications are very similar. Both display 1680x1050 and have a 2ms GTG response time. I like the 226B screen better on looks. I just think the other screen looks like a TV and that puts me off. If you don't find a suitable answer in here, then you're probably better posting in the monitor section.
I was playing Trackmania Nations Forever last night for the first time. To get the best playable settings I thought the benchmark would give me a good indication of how the game would run. At 1920x1440 with 4xAA/16xAF and everything else set at maximum I got 41FPS. I then tried the same settings at 2048x1536 and got 37.5FPS. For the third time I tried 1600x1200 with these settings and I got 51FPS and it seemed a lot smoother than the other resolutions (slowed down a tiny bit on some parts of the benchmark). When I launched the game and went through the first 5 races to get some medals I realised that the actual game was running slower than the benchmark. So I may have to put a resolution down still if it gets worse the more I play but it's perfectly playable at this resolution. Just not as smooth as the benchmark at times.
Point I'm trying to make is that even with my 8800GTX overclocked, my CPU at 3.2Ghz and 4gb of RAM (3gb visible XP) I am seeing the benefits of lowering my resolution to keep up with a free game. 1680x1050 might not be so wasted if you just crank up the IQ settings and have your games looking fantastic
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