Does a 23" monitor make sense with a p4

[Loyudo]

My friend uses his old dell with a pentium 4 mostly for internet browsing and watching dvd's. He's wanting to get a 23" lcd monitor for watching movies. All of the monitors I found at this size are 1920x1080 obviously he couldn't play anything at that resolution with his computer. At the lower resolution he would have to play things at would it still look alright? Or is it just a complete waste of money?

 

[Rifter]

he could play media fine at that res if its either not compressed or if the GPU can offload the processing from the CPU. What type of media playback are you referring to?

 

[VirtualLarry]

For normal desktop usage, a 23" LCD is not overkill for a P4. But to watch videos, full-screen, he's going to need to upgrade his video card to something that supports hardware decoding for the codecs he is going to use.

Hopefully, his computer has a PCI-E slot, otherwise things are going to get expensive if it's AGP.

 

[corkyg]

It's not the P4 that limits resolution - it is the video card. I use a 23-in monitor with a P4 - no probs. Anyway, upgrade the video card to one that handles the 1980xwhatever resolution.

 

[Loyudo]

Good to know. Thanks guys, I'm pretty sure he does have pci express slot though a pretty weak psu. I found an hd 5550 on new egg for $41 that should serve his purposes.

 

[yottabit]

If he does need to run things at lower resolutions, it's really dependent on the monitor whether or not it will scale nicely. I've seen some LCD's that are awful running at anything other than an even multiple of their native resolution, and some that do it quite well. The only way I know of to determine a monitor's scaling abilities is to read reviews.

 

[Lanyap]

Do you know which Dell model it is?

If you get a dedicated video card you should be ok. The onboard video on the older P4 models can't handle the big LCD resolutions.