Big Monitor--Suggestions?

I am gonna get a new monitor at the beginning of next year. I am thinking post christmas a good time to get a deal? I am buying in germany and they have after xmas specials at a lot of stores. I will be looking in the net as well. I am on a budget, but saw some 24" that may be affordable, but want to know where NOT to save money. I look at the specs, but they dont mean that much to me, so any tips i.e minimum resolution, reaction time etc - are appreciated. I will be looking to multi table (am I stating the obvious here? lol) and play maybe different sites at the same time.
thanks

Is my grafix card an issue? Its not a high speed PC gamer card. ATI Radeon HD 3400 series, 1 GB.

Hey,
This is my first post on this site, but I'm a computer technician so I thought I'd help you out.
For multi-tabling (assuming you are tiling), I would definitely go for at least a 1600x900 resolution, 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 being the best you can get for a reasonable price. The response time isn't all that important if all you want to do is play poker, but if your looking to watch movies or play some video games, the lower the better.

The graphics card will work fine for any monitor other than the super expensive 2560x1600 ones, unless of course you plan on gaming or watching HD video.
Just make sure you have a DVI out on your graphics card, because this is the standard nowadays for most monitors.

I would recommend sticking to the major brands, like Samsung, Dell, Acer, etc
But since you didn't mention a budget, I can't really make a specific recommendation.

Hope this helps

What the new guy said lol

oh and welcome to CC new guy nice of you to help someone here hope you stick around this is a great site

inti

Thanks. Yes, a nice warm welcome to CC!
Thanks for the tips. I am needing to spend as little as possible, I wish I could say money is no object. Actually, money IS no object, since an object is something here...lol. So I was looking in the net for the best deals, there are some decent looking ones, found an Acer 24" for 160€, around 220$. So that is the budget I want to stay in. But I will wait till after Christmas, there may be sales in stores here as well as the net.

Just make sure you have a DVI out on your graphics card, because this is the standard nowadays for most monitors.

quote

in case you don't have DVI out, plugs are available to make it fit.
I'm not really gonna give advice because so much is available, but I bought Samsung SyncMaster P2370 (23 inch widescreen) a few months ago and I'm very happy about it. For playing poker it suits for me.
On the other desktop I just have a regular 19 inch and wow, the difference is amazing.

In terms of monitor performance, don't rely on specs alone. Specs published on sites and listed on manufacturer sites/boxes usually don't mean a lot because of variables in testing conditions, and they always want to make their specs look bigger or better than the competition.

The true measure of monitor quality comes in the form of user reviews. Read through people's firsthand accounts on how the monitor looks and how reliable it is. Take a look at newegg.com here:

http://www.newegg.com/Store/Category.aspx?Category=19&name=Monitors

They probably sell some of the same monitor models in Germany, so just find one that has good reviews (5 eggs) and see if you can get it in Germany.

You'll likely be looking at a 22-24" monitor with a 1920x1200 resolution. That is pretty standard these days, and not really very expensive at all (at least in the USA).

The Radeon card you have says it supports up to 1920x1200 resolution, so that should be fine. As others have already stated, just make sure you have the appropriate output to connect the monitor.

If you don't have the right output on your old card, then a cheap video card replacement will be fine. Something like this (Radeon 3450, fanless, low-power consumption, DVI, HDMI, D-Sub out, runs 1080p video like a champ, $30 USD):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...1350&cm_re=radeon_3450-_-14-131-350-_-Product

If you buy a 24", make sure it will do 19200 x 1200 resolution. That way you can easily fit 6-tables on it without overlay.

I'm using a Dell 24" UltraSharp running VGA 19200 x 1200 from about 2007 - works awesome...

Well, I got a 23.5" ACER with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. Not quite as big as other monitors (1920x1200 for example) but still pretty good.

I can multi table 10 double up sit and goes on Merge with it without too much overlap - and that's not in mini mode, it's in regular mode where I just shrink each window to its minimum possible size.

Do any of you guys use HD TV's? I got one recently and hooked it up through an HDMI cable - it works awesome. Plus the price of tv's has come down so much they are cheap now!

I have a separate computer setup for my home theater system, using a low-profile, low-power consumption box to fuel a 42" HDTV. I don't play poker on it, but I could probably get like 16 tables on one screen with no visibility issues that way.

It's just awesome having my movie collection (1000+ titles) in a storage array all ready to go -- just a couple clicks or a title search and BAM! the movie is on screen. It's doubly sweet because the storage array is hooked up to my home network, so if someone's using the TV I can still watch any movie from the database using my laptop WiFi or my office computer on the fly.

The cost of electronic hardware these days has really come down. With a little ingenuity and modest budget you can create some fabulous setups.