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

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What kind of video card is he considering using?

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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.

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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.

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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).