Monitor advice to go with my system

[Bowlo]

well all the parts for my new system arrive next week but im stuck on choosing a monitor.
Ive still got my old 19" CRT but thought i might aswell look at a new monitor.
Part of my system is:

ATI X1800 XT
AMD Athlon Venice 3500+
2GB Kingston 400 DDR 3200

I want to get a good monitor for gaming but also one that best fits with the hardware ive got so as not to go overboard with anything that I wont get the full benifit out of anyway.
I was also thinking of going over to widescreen if thats possible with the hardware I have.
The X1800 XT I bought was more to my budget as it was only £150 but id be looking to upgrade that sometime next year but will do perfect for now so maybe also a monitor for future purposes?

Cheers

[Noni]

A 20inch widescreen will show you a nice resolution with making your hardware work.

Check out the Viewsonic VX2025WM, and have a read here-

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/

I find the 19 inch widescreens too small.

[davidstone28]

If you're going to buy the 2025, make sure you can live with its absence of "scaling". In other words, if you're playing a game or watching a film that doesn't support the monitor's native resolution, the monitor will stretch the image widthways giving some very odd looking results (imagine say a 1280x1024 image with the horizontal stretched from 1280 to 1650 pixels).

Have a look at www.widescreengamingforums.com to see which games can or can't scale.

Some people have suggested using the override in the graphics drivers but users of the ATI cards have reported mixed results with the monitor refusing to scale even with the driver override. Override doesn't seem to work with the Nvidia drivers on the 7XXX cards with the monitor giving an "out of range" error message.

I was going to buy a 2025 - which is pretty cheap at £280 - but the absence of scaling / 1:1 pixel matching was an absolute no-no. Shame also its not height adjustable.

If you don't mind paying a £150 premium, the Dell 2007 is worth looking at, though I'd wait a few months for Dell to update the firmware on those monitors to resolve the colour banding fault.

[Bowlo]

Ah cool thats some info that I didnt know.

This is 1 monitor I was looking at. The widescreen right down the bottom
http://www.gnrintl.com/products.jsp?pct=lcd&&ss=19

I 1st looked at it as its only £150 and it looked pretty good for that price but I cant see anything about it supporting scaling/ 1.1 pixel matching