Large computer monitors-thoughts? - Axiom Message Boards

Axiom Home Page

My brother is considering, actually salivating, about buying this Dell large 30" LCD monitor for his computer (he's got near $1800 saved now for a new one soon).
Why he needs a monitor larger than most people's home televisions, i don't know. He just bought a 50" Pioneer plasma and i told him to use that instead for his big screen gaming, but to buy something more resonable to fit his desk.
Anyway, that aside, he is very keen on buying this monitor and as mentioned he is a big gamer with the online FPS genre (Rainbow Six, etc.). From what i know of the native resolution of this Dell monitor and the given gaming capabilities even with SLI setups, i do not believe his gaming experience will be all that functional. The resolution is so high that gaming at 2560x1600 would drop his frame rates into a far less playable rate (game dependant of course). The option of using a lesser, non-native resolution tends to create awful images.

Thoughts?
Should he consider buying this for a gaming monitor given the present technology or should he realistically think of a 24" or less perhaps to ensure his gaming experience will not be slowed?

What kind of video card is he considering using? There's more than just the question of whether the frame rate would be any good at that resolution, there's the question of whether that resolution would be supported at all!

Me, I'd stick with a 20 or a 24 for gaming. Spend the extra on the really, really nice video card.

He should definitely be using the Plasma, as I seem to recall the Plasma's are near CRT in refresh rates. Other wise he should be looking at the 22-24" LCD's as the refresh rates on them are getting down into the 4-5ms range and neglible for gaming purposes. Something like this

Quote:

What kind of video card is he considering using?

Whatever would be required. SLi is still coming along but in its infancy with nvidia leading the pack. Crossfire forget it.
But i don't think that matters much since the top end items you can get still may not be enough to do smooth gaming at that resolution.
It does depend on the game of course, older games would not be as much an issue assuming they even have options to run as high at 2500+ resolution. Games that do not need high FPS for gameplay also might not be a problem, but his fav genre are first person shooters. A minimum of 30 fps is needed for smooth play but i would recommend that anyone gets at least 40-60 fps during gameplay to use as overhead. Nothing worse than coming into a big firefight and with 10 people shooting at once your fps drops from 40 to 23 and the lag kills you.

So it's the 8800 or the highway, then. I don't know if that one does SLi (it must, surely). That probably would work. THe other question would be CPU.

Quote:

So it's the 8800 or the highway, then. I don't know if that one does SLi (it must, surely). That probably would work. THe other question would be CPU.

Yes, the new 8800 and a very new cpu, Duo core or maybe even a quad core but the benefits are questionable with the latter.
I imagine there would be other issues as well. I have some apps that don't scale up with Windows to the 1280 resolution i use now. I can't imagine trying to read the menus in resolutions beyond 1900.

Oh, I've had no problems with legibility on 30" displays, although I was using them on Macs.

It's not the refresh rate on LCDs. That's constant at 60hz. You want a "response time" of < 15ms. Many of the smaller high-end LCD monitors are pushing under 6ms response. And he really needs to look at reviews to see if that monitor is susceptible to artifacting, macroblocking, ghosting and the like when gaming. And a pretty hefty vidcard to push that resolution, as noted by others above.

If he's a competitive online gamer, then such a large monitor is overkill. He'll be moving too fast to appreciate the decreased jaggies that comes with using a higher screen resolution. As far as I'm aware, the higher resolution is the only advantage of a larger screen with first-person shooters. It's not like you can "see" more of the game world with a larger screen than you can with a smaller one. And as others have mentioned, it's hard to get good framerates at such high resolution with today's hardware. When I've seen serious competitive gamers play, they dial down the resolution and graphics effects to ensure steady framerates. And if you decrease the resolution, it'll look even blockier on a larger monitor.

Although often the 6 ms ones aren't full color--they're ~232,000 dithered up to 16.2 million. Usually the 20s and 24s (at least the higher end ones) are full color and high refresh rate. But you won't get that combo below the premium, large widescreens. You can usually tell, because the number of colors lists >16 million or 16.2 million, rather than 16.7 million.

As for pushing frame rate? I'm pretty casual, and I'll take a little bit of hesitation in favor of the pretty. OTOH, I don't have any problem with either in most games I have (other than Oblivion).

I thought that this link might help your brother make a sound decision.

http://gear.ign.com/articles/720/720303p1.html

The second page has user reported lag for various HDTVs. Not a scientific sample but it might help.

You might also check out some local video stores and see if they have any big screen TVs hooked up to an Xbox or Play Station and give it a try.

I use my Samsung HL-S5687W about 50% of the time as a computer monitor. I don’t play action games on it yet but for all other computing including strategy games and video editing it‘s awesome.

Imagine going from an old 15 inch CRT to a top of the line 21 inch LCD. Now double that and it will give you an idea how much better the picture size and quality look to me. Supposedly Samsung worked with Microsoft to create a game mode on some models to enhance game play.

If I get a house and upgrade to a HD projector the DLP will be my only computer monitor, it‘s that impressive.

Dean

I think the feedback pretty much covers all the negatives i've already highlighted to my brother about the idea of buying a large lcd monitor.

It would be great for massive spreadsheets though, i'll give it that.

I still see slight ghosting even on the faster response time LCD's so for now I'm sticking with CRT's for gaming. But I prefer LCD's for work.

I'd agree with what's been said, once you hit the 20-23ish range, spend rest of the money on a video card.

I see tearing on mine, but I'd rather not occupy my desk with an enormous old monster. I'll replace this one when I can't repair it for $30.

I don't think getting a 30" dell widescreen is a wise choice UNLESS you want/need all of that desktop space.

On top of the resolution, you aren't going to notice it after a certain point.

In addiction, for him to play any of the new games in a year or so he needs to upgrade his computer. Some rigs can't even handle the current games out at normal resolutions.

If he was a graphic designer and regularly used all that space, sure.

He is much better off going with a very nice HDTV with 1080i resolution.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824112174

^^ That one has 1080i with DVI. It also is bigger for less.

Dollars are spent better that way.

Hey Chess,

Not sure if any has mentioned this but you will need a special dual-link DVI card (not to be confused with dual port DVI cards) to drive that 30 inch badboy. There are very limited cards on the market which are dual-link and high end ones go for about $600. On top of that, most games (not sure about just released games) don't support those ultra high resolutions so that means anything he sees will not have the correct aspect ratio.

I purchased a Dell 24 incher and totally love but for games everything is horizontally stretched (like when viewing 4:3 content on a 16:9 screen). Of course I rarely play games anymore and they are old which only support max res of 1600x1200(UT2k4 and Warcraft 3). And like you or someone else mentioned, SLI is not rock solid and even if it is he will have to buy 2 $500-600 video cards to get decent framerates for most games, esp FPS.