Which would you rather buy ?

Question

A Acer AL2016 20 inch wide screen lcd monitor or a PCI 256 mb DX10 card and a new motherboard for your used to be non compatible P4 CPU ?


I have a old ev700 19 inch CRT monitor..........

Answer 1

It depends on what your computer lifestyle is.

There are only two real advantages to a LCD monitor:

1. It uses less electricity.
2. It weighs a lot less.(A big plus over a 19" CRT when going to a LAN party)

The CRT will have better performance as far as response time and usually better picture quality. You probably have around 17.5"-18" visible with a 19" CRT so you would benefit from another 2"+ of diagonal size on the LCD. That is very nice.

The video card has only one plus, but it may be a very large one depending on what you currently have and what you are using it for. One thing I should tell you is that very few games support DX10 and some DX10 cards are SLOWER than earlier models. Example: a 7600GT is considerably faster than a 8600GT. Before you buy educate yourself by looking at the benchmarks in futuremarks ORB(online results browser):

http://service.futuremark.com/orb/projectsearch.jsp;jsessionid=NDAIIAGFBKGI

Poke around in there and be sure to watch the clock speeds to make sure they are running as stock so you get a true evaluation.

Not knowing what you currently have and what you do I cannot give you good advice, but hopefully I have given you enough information that you can decide for yourself.

Answer 2

Well, I'm searching for a monitor also.

From what I've seen, your crazy to purchase a 20" monitor when the prices are so good on the 22" wide sceens. I'm finding 22" all over the place for about $250.

I'm also looking at eh 24" monitors and finding darn good ones for $350 and up.

The wide screens are great for game, movies, and multi-tasking so you may want to consider one.

Hope this helps.