Spec me a monitor

JonoB · 9 Dec 2011 at 15:25

Hi all,

I am looking for a 24" monitor, budget up to £200.

It must have HDMI, as I am running two monitors on my PC, and the DVI output is taken by the other monitor.

I was just about to buy the BenQ EW2430, which ticked all the right boxes, but has poor response times.

The monitor is used for office work (programming, spreadsheets, etc) and gaming.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

cmndr_andi · 9 Dec 2011 at 15:30

Hi there,

Would you consider a 23in monitor? If so then a nice 23 E-IPS panel like this one would be great for your needs. It offers great image quality and viewing angles - plus it has low enough response times to make it very usable as a gaming monitor. Here is an in-depth review.

The above ASUS happens to have a HDMI port, but assuming you only need to send the video signal to the monitor (not the sound) then you could just as easily go for a DVI monitor and use a cable like this - there is absolutely no drop in image quality (since the image signal transmitted over DVI and HDMI is the same).

JonoB · 9 Dec 2011 at 16:10

That monitor looks pretty nice. My eyes are not what they used to be, so I may struggle a bit on 23" with that resolution. I realise that 24" isnt that much difference....

I absolutely need HDMI - since my graphics card has 1 VGA, 1 DVA and 1 HDMI. The DVI is already taken, and I certainly dont want to use VGA.

cmndr_andi · 9 Dec 2011 at 16:19

JonoB said:
That monitor looks pretty nice. My eyes are not what they used to be, so I may struggle a bit on 23" with that resolution. I realise that 24" isnt that much difference....

I absolutely need HDMI - since my graphics card has 1 VGA, 1 DVA and 1 HDMI. The DVI is already taken, and I certainly dont want to use VGA.

Yea, 23 vs 24 isn't really that much of a difference (see here) but it may be worth looking at one in a shop to ensure that the text isn't too small for you.

As for the connections, what you can do is plug the HDMI to DVI cable I linked to above into the HDMI port of your graphics card and then plug the DVI end of the cable into a DVI monitor. This allows you to use two DVI monitors with your existing graphics card and broadens your choice of available monitors quite a bit (using a cable like this does not reduce the image quality at all).

JonoB · 9 Dec 2011 at 16:46

cmndr_andi said:
As for the connections, what you can do is plug the HDMI to DVI cable I linked to above into the HDMI port of your graphics card and then plug the DVI end of the cable into a DVI monitor. This allows you to use two DVI monitors with your existing graphics card and broadens your choice of available monitors quite a bit (using a cable like this does not reduce the image quality at all).

Aha, gotcha, thanks!