New monitor ... 20" and 24"-ws from Dell are options; help?

I'm thinking about getting a new monitor ... there's a real good deal on at the moment on the Dell 20" Ultrasharp (non-widescreen) which means that (with my company's employee-benefit scheme discount of 3%) I can get it for near enough exactly £300, and the 24" widescreen ultrasharp is £550, but it's a lot of money for a monitor! Dell's website say that the deals will run out tomorrow, btw.

I'm having a bit of a 'mare trying to work out what to do.

I would very seriously consider the 24" widescreen, but I'm really not sure my GFX would handle it. I have an Asus X800XT PE, which is a decent enough card (it was top-of-the-range a few years ago), but it's getting on a bit, and I'm not sure it would cope with WoW (the main intended use) at full detail @ 1920x1200 resolution.

I'm even a little unsure about whether it would cope at full res with 1600x1200 in WoW, with the 20" monitor?

If I were to upgrade my GFX, I'd have to get a PCI-e card, which needs a new mobo, which probably needs new RAM (details in my sig, if anyone can advise differently) and might as well get a new CPU. All lots more expensive.

I suppose that if I could be pretty certain that my PC could cope with 1920x1200 then I'd go with the 24" widescreen. Anyone know, or can guess, how well an ATI X800XT Platinum Edition would cope at that res (1920x1200)?

Thanks in advance for any help :)

I'd say if you're wanting widescreen then 24" is the minimum - 20" widescreen is too 'short' for my liking and I much prefer a 4:3 screen for both work and gaming (which is why i have the dell 20" 4:3 at both work and home). As to your question on how well your graphics will cope - it'll depend on what you run (obviously) but in my experience you need serious horsepower for 1600x1200 (let alone 1920x1200) for the more modern games.
You've always got the option of scaling the image from a lower resolution (i'm told this is far better on the 24" screen electronics) or living with a reduced screen area and black borders if things really won't run well at your desired native resolution.

I dunno if World of Warcraft counts as a modern game? If I can't really expect the quality to be good at 1920x1200 with WoW then I probably can't really justify it.

How good is the downscaling? I know that running Windows at 1024x768 on a screen with 1280x1024 native resolution shows a marked decrease in image clarity. If I were to run at 1680x1050, would it look a lot worse? Would the performance notably improve?

Well I just had a quick look on the tomshardwares vga charts, and @ 1600x1200 your card beats my 6800GT in everything so far.

How is this relavent? I just recently purchased a dell 24" montior, and I can play WoW fine at full res, ie 1920x1200.

This montior also offers 1:1 pixel mapping afaik, which means you can run @ 1600x1200 and it puts two black bars down the side of the game, rather then try to stretch the image out.

I found the monitor great and am glad i made the leap. (Previously used a 19" iiyama TFT with a native res of 1280 x 1024)

hope that helps,

Nims

just here to give two thumbs up for the 2007wfp

and reminding that it will be £400 again from tuesday...

Right, I've done it. I must be mad, but I've gone ahead with the 24" Widescreen for £548. Now I just have to put up with the agony of waiting for it to arrive!! :)

I've just seen this over at the bargins section

DaKid, you will not regret buying that screen, It abslutley rocks, I have had my 2405PW for 9 months and I still look at it in awe now :)

1 thing you may find though is that this purchase WILL mean that you need to up your graphics horsepower. I play almost solely WoW (sad git I am)
and I upgraded from a AGP 6800GT to a Pcie X1800XT256 to get a more playable framerate at 1920 x 1200. With 75% detail settings and low AA you can get a playable frame rate on the X1800XT (average 30fps)

FPS games like Oblivion and Fear need to be turned down to between 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 depending on detail levels, but the monitor does scale really well!!!:)

I would suggest if you look for a graphics card today that you look at a X1900XT512 OR be prepared to run at lower res with details turned down a bit and wait for DX10 etc b4 you upgrade your platfrom:shocked2:

Considering my old laptop had a 9600 Mobility, it ran 1920x1200 at decent fps in Battlefield Vietnam and Half Life 2 (even with settings turned up to medium/high). I'd say with your more modern card, you should have no problem running the majority of things at a decent rate. :)

Thanks for all the welcome comments. I am very much looking forward to receiving it. I'm going to wait for the whole GFX card (and mobo/ram/cpu) upgrade until after Vista and DX10 ... am happy waiting, especially as people seem think I ought to be able to at least cope in the mean time :D

Welcome to the club! I recently got a 2407WFP too. I dont game to much these days, but this monitor scales very well to lower resolutions so its not really a problem.

Its fantastic for watching series of 24, lost and Spooks! Really helps expand the use of my PC. Oh and best of all, if you decide to start console gaming (I am thinking of either Wii or PS3) then there are lots of inputs and PiP so you can if necessary run 1/2 game and 1/2 windows or just use the screen for the console!

Another thumbs up for the 24" Dell... I got the 2405 about a year ago and no other monitor has made me think "mmm that looks nice" since then. Except maybe the 30"... :D

I run all my games at 1920x1200 on my X800XL so your XT PE will be just fine for now. That said, your last post here was over a week ago now so I'm guessing you've already worked that out and are too busy gaming to bother reading this ;) enjoy...