Originally Posted by
Steve B
LCD's differ from CRT's in that they refresh synchronously, not progressively. This means all pixels change at the same time, rather than a gun moving back and forth across the picture. Your standard LCD is a matrix of pixels, with a maximum resolution, commonly known as the native resolution being the number of pixels along the width and height of the panel. The three nouveau standards for TV, being 480, 720 and 1080, refer to the number of horizontal lines used to create the picture. i.e. 480 is 480 horizontal lines. Each option can be suffixed with one of the letters, p or i. "p" stands for progressive scanning, in that each frame is completely rendered before moving onto the next. "i" stands for interlaced scanning. This is where some of the principles of CRT image creation are recycled. Half the frame is rendered, followed by the second half of the frame being rendered, with a time delay of frame rate / 2. It is useful to note that theres no point in playing a 1080 line video on a 1280x1024 native resolution screen, as the screen is technically incapable of outputting 1080 line vide streams.
So thats enough about video, now onto hardware.
What exactly are you using your PC for?
What kind of resolution will the onboard graphics be driving?
If all your doing is playing standard definition avi files, then sure, the onboard graphics on my mATX board do me just fine, and thats driving a 1920x1200 panel. If i want to play a 1080 trailer from apple, its like watching a slideshow. The onboard graphics simply aren't capable of driving a half-decent frame-rate. Its certainly capable of handling standard-definition DVD, which does look nice with the large screen real-estate. The key thing i think is to analyse what you actually want the machine to do. For memory hogging tasks, personally, i dont think 512Mib of ram will be enough, especially when another 512 is less than 25 quid.