Monitor and Video Card - Getting the balance right.

[descombobulator]

I reckon I have about £450 to spend on a new Monitor and Video card. It will be mainly for general office use and First-person shoot em ups. Occasionally, I will watch DVDs, but still sitting at the desk.

I'm thinking about a 20" widescreen monitor running in 1600x1200 resolution. The trouble is, I'm not sure what model of video card I would need to typically drive the monitor at 50 fps, say, in the latest FPS games. There's is little point in having a sh_t hot monitor if the video card is too feeble to enjoy it.

In short, how do I get the best balance between the two components.

If it matters, I intend to build upon a P5B deluxe MB, E6600 Core2 and 2G of quality RAM.

 

[fish99]

Depends how long you want the video card to last you. Are you planning upgrading early to Vista and playing DX10 games? There's only the 8800 GTX/GTS that offer DX10 at the moment and the cheaper GTS is over £350. There will be some mid range DX10 cards out febuary though.

If you're not bothered about DX10 for now, you could spend £280 on something like the Viewsonic VX2025 (MVA panel) and £170 on a X1900 XT 256 mb and that would get you more or less what you're after.

Of course it'll vary depending on the game in question - that would let you run HL2 in 1680*1050 and get over 50 fps, but in a really demanding game like Fear you'd have to drop to a lower widescreen res like 1280*800, or lower the graphics settings. Running lower resolutions isn't a big problem btw - I use 1280*800 on my Dell 2007WFP (1680*1050 native res) and it looks completely fine.

If you're not too fussed about viewing angles you could get a cheaper TN panel screen like the Belinea 2225S1W (22" btw) for £235 which would give you a bit more to play with when choosing a video card. Or there's the Samsung SM205BW (20", TN panel again) which is even cheaper.

 

[descombobulator]

Thanks for the advice, fish.

The option to play games at less than the optimum resolution is certainly one I would consider. Pardon my ignorance, but if I run the card below the 'natural' resolution of the monitor, I take it that the monitor has to map the lower resultion to the higher. How effective is this in practice? Does it produce artifacts.

Viewing angle is not an issue. Unless I can persuade someone to sit on my lap, it will be me watching it from 2 -3 feet away.

As for DX10 and Vista. No doubt I'll go over to DX10 at some point. But I'm not willing to take out a new mortgage to do so. I'll happily sacrifice eye candy for FPS.