OK, so I'm bragging, but you would too.
I just received today, via Fedex, two Black (to match my desk) NEC Multisync LCD 1810X's 18.1" "XtraView" TFT LCD displays with "Ambix" technology (basically "Ambix" is NEC's fancy way of saying they will run on both standard analog graphics boards and the newer, high-end DVI or DFB boards). I just finished hooking them up to my brandy new 3D Labs Oxygen GVX420 (128MB, dual Glint 4 rasterizers, dual analog and dual DVI) board that also arrived today (talk about timing). I bought everything from, get this, BUY.COM! They actually had the best price on the whole package deal and threw in FREE shipping to boot. Everything came to a total of just under $4,500 and arrived only two days after placing the order.
What a site to behold - $5,000 worth of display heaven. It doesn't get much better than this - unless of course I had gone with the LCD 2010X's instead, but those two extra inches cost another $3,000 that I wasn't willing to pay for.
About the monitors
In a word: SLICK! They're black... everywhere, including the cables, buttons, etc. At night (like as I write), with the lights dim, the borders and bases almost disappear making it look as though the two screens are hovering side-by-side just a few inches above my desk. NEC, and every other TFT panel manufacturer, recommends that you run them at their maximum resolution (1280x1024) because of a technical issue inherent in TFT displays (see the PDF document at this URL for detailed information and pictures if you must have all of the details). Also, while the LCD 1810X is capable of supporting a refresh rate of 75Hz at that resolution, they recommend that you use 60Hz for "better clarity and color reproduction." This may seem odd at first, but once you understand that "refresh" on a TFT display isn't the same thing as it is on a CRT, then it becomes a moot point. To my understanding, LCD's don't "refresh" - or something along those lines (I'm not an expert).
The clarity and brilliance are, in a word, astounding! How I lived with the dull (relatively), cumbersome dinosaurs named Samsung SyncMaster 955DFs and a myriad of predecessor CRTs for so long is beyond me. A few things you notice before you even plug them in is, firstly, how light they are while still in the box! I was carrying one box in each hand after they were delivered. Second, once you open the box, all the while giddy as a school boy who just got his first kiss (just after the "girls got coodies" stage), you get this giant grin on your face because they're just too damn cool! Third, once you place them on your desk where your gargantuan, dual 19" QE2 boat anchors once sat, you realize just how much desk space you were sacrificing to the monitor gods. I have retrieved space that I thought never existed on my desk. No more feelings of claustrophobia here, I've got space to spare.
A couple of reasons I spent alot more and opted for the 1810X ($1,600 each) over the 1830 ($1,000 each), which purportedly has the same display, was the features the 10X has that the 30 does not. The 10X support both analog and DVI natively (NEC's "Ambix" technology). The 30 is analog only. The 10X is also a "pivot" display, meaning that with a single finger you can rotate the screen 90-degrees into portrait mode for viewing long documents, web pages, etc and for schlick desktop publishing. The support neck also extends vertically, where the 30's is fixed.
In my travels to decide upon the best display at the 18.1" size I viewed and demoed/evaluated comparably priced/sized offerings from Sony, IBM and Viewsonic/Nokia and the NEC was a shade better for the price than each of them, particularly when it came to very fine text and lines like those in 3D Studio MAX - which brings us to...
The 3D Labs Oxygen GVX420
While waiting for the new ATI FireGL-4 to become available, I sprung for a 3D Labs Oxygen GVX420 "mega" board. I really went through some mental gyrations with this one. I am pretty sure that I will dispose of the board (ie: pass it on to my brother-in-law) within the next 60 days, so I was hesitant to drop $1,500 on a graphics board that is soon to be replaced by a FireGL. That said, I decided to torture myself using 3DS Max on my old system which has a Matrox G450 dual head board. Forget about it! Trying to rotate a large object in real time is an impossibility with a G450, so it became obvious that it would be worth the $1,500 for 60 frustration-free days of OpenGL pleasure. I was tempted to go with the Wildcat 5110, but the extra $1,000 and the fact that my B-I-L doesn't get a crisp, mint hand-me-down prevented me from doing so, not to mention the fact that most insiders promise that the FGL4 will be faster than the WC5110 in most areas and I just couldn't have that.
The GVX is a monster of a board. It's a full-length, dual-slot, AGP Pro board. If you ask me, it's a totally idiotic design (Check out the PDF document here and scroll down a little to see a large picture of it). ATI is making the FGL4 the way this behemoth should've been made to begin with. They're only manufacturing the FGL4 with dual DVIs out and are supplying dongle adapters for those poor schmucks who compete in the "Monitor Special Olympics" with lowly CRTs, if you catch my drift. 3D Labs, the geniuses that they are, decided to manufacture a board that not only requires an AGP Pro slot (no biggie), but also takes up the adjacent PCI slot because it's a two-board solution! You can NOT get around this with the GVX420. The attached PCI board holds the dual DVI outputs while the main board holds the dual 15-pin DSub analog outputs. Now not only do you have to worry about your motherboard being able to support a full-length AGP Pro board (I've seen many mobos place capacitors or other components a ways behing the AGP slot making it impossible to use a true full-length card), but you also may have to remove a PCI board to make room for this ridiculous contraption. I had to choose my "least important" PCI-based board and remove it to open up a slot for this Brontosaurus, which reluctantly fell to either my 3-port Firewire board or my SoundBlaster Live 5.1. Firewire lost and got the boot (I need my MP3s). Then I had to move my SCSI U160 and FastTrak 100 RAID controllers each down one slot which sent Windows 2000 crashing to earth faster than a lawn dart at terminal velocity. The term "BSOD" does this deranged exhibition of Micro$oft programming prowess little justice as I was certain that my system was going to spew the drive containing the offending, lame excuse for an OS from its bay. Fortunately, I needed to install Server anyway and all data was safely archived on an 8mm AME tape, so no harm done.
Once everything returned to "normal" (by Micro$oft standards), I installed 3DS Max 4, Photoshop 6, etc and ran the GVX through its paces. It's a sweet performer, especially in MAX. If the FGL4 turns out to be as fast as they're claiming, then true real time 3D modeling may be at hand, because I have some very large, complex models that the GVX handled with aplomb. I'm impressed. I don't play any games, not even Solitare, so I couldn't care less about how well my $1,500 graphics board performs in whatever gaming benchmarks the various sites use to gauge performance, although I'd like to see how it does running a true OpenGL game, just for kicks - but I'm not about to destabilize this crummy Micro$oft OS any further by loading a toy onto it.
Anyway, that's about it. It's a non-technical review, but I'm not an A+ dork anyway so I don't make myself out to be one.
I really just wanted to brag and rub it in to those less fortunate. As for me, I'll continue to enjoy graphic nirvana until something better comes out, like holographic displays.
Later.
I just received today, via Fedex, two Black (to match my desk) NEC Multisync LCD 1810X's 18.1" "XtraView" TFT LCD displays with "Ambix" technology (basically "Ambix" is NEC's fancy way of saying they will run on both standard analog graphics boards and the newer, high-end DVI or DFB boards). I just finished hooking them up to my brandy new 3D Labs Oxygen GVX420 (128MB, dual Glint 4 rasterizers, dual analog and dual DVI) board that also arrived today (talk about timing). I bought everything from, get this, BUY.COM! They actually had the best price on the whole package deal and threw in FREE shipping to boot. Everything came to a total of just under $4,500 and arrived only two days after placing the order.
What a site to behold - $5,000 worth of display heaven. It doesn't get much better than this - unless of course I had gone with the LCD 2010X's instead, but those two extra inches cost another $3,000 that I wasn't willing to pay for.
About the monitors
In a word: SLICK! They're black... everywhere, including the cables, buttons, etc. At night (like as I write), with the lights dim, the borders and bases almost disappear making it look as though the two screens are hovering side-by-side just a few inches above my desk. NEC, and every other TFT panel manufacturer, recommends that you run them at their maximum resolution (1280x1024) because of a technical issue inherent in TFT displays (see the PDF document at this URL for detailed information and pictures if you must have all of the details). Also, while the LCD 1810X is capable of supporting a refresh rate of 75Hz at that resolution, they recommend that you use 60Hz for "better clarity and color reproduction." This may seem odd at first, but once you understand that "refresh" on a TFT display isn't the same thing as it is on a CRT, then it becomes a moot point. To my understanding, LCD's don't "refresh" - or something along those lines (I'm not an expert).
The clarity and brilliance are, in a word, astounding! How I lived with the dull (relatively), cumbersome dinosaurs named Samsung SyncMaster 955DFs and a myriad of predecessor CRTs for so long is beyond me. A few things you notice before you even plug them in is, firstly, how light they are while still in the box! I was carrying one box in each hand after they were delivered. Second, once you open the box, all the while giddy as a school boy who just got his first kiss (just after the "girls got coodies" stage), you get this giant grin on your face because they're just too damn cool! Third, once you place them on your desk where your gargantuan, dual 19" QE2 boat anchors once sat, you realize just how much desk space you were sacrificing to the monitor gods. I have retrieved space that I thought never existed on my desk. No more feelings of claustrophobia here, I've got space to spare.
A couple of reasons I spent alot more and opted for the 1810X ($1,600 each) over the 1830 ($1,000 each), which purportedly has the same display, was the features the 10X has that the 30 does not. The 10X support both analog and DVI natively (NEC's "Ambix" technology). The 30 is analog only. The 10X is also a "pivot" display, meaning that with a single finger you can rotate the screen 90-degrees into portrait mode for viewing long documents, web pages, etc and for schlick desktop publishing. The support neck also extends vertically, where the 30's is fixed.
In my travels to decide upon the best display at the 18.1" size I viewed and demoed/evaluated comparably priced/sized offerings from Sony, IBM and Viewsonic/Nokia and the NEC was a shade better for the price than each of them, particularly when it came to very fine text and lines like those in 3D Studio MAX - which brings us to...
The 3D Labs Oxygen GVX420
While waiting for the new ATI FireGL-4 to become available, I sprung for a 3D Labs Oxygen GVX420 "mega" board. I really went through some mental gyrations with this one. I am pretty sure that I will dispose of the board (ie: pass it on to my brother-in-law) within the next 60 days, so I was hesitant to drop $1,500 on a graphics board that is soon to be replaced by a FireGL. That said, I decided to torture myself using 3DS Max on my old system which has a Matrox G450 dual head board. Forget about it! Trying to rotate a large object in real time is an impossibility with a G450, so it became obvious that it would be worth the $1,500 for 60 frustration-free days of OpenGL pleasure. I was tempted to go with the Wildcat 5110, but the extra $1,000 and the fact that my B-I-L doesn't get a crisp, mint hand-me-down prevented me from doing so, not to mention the fact that most insiders promise that the FGL4 will be faster than the WC5110 in most areas and I just couldn't have that.
The GVX is a monster of a board. It's a full-length, dual-slot, AGP Pro board. If you ask me, it's a totally idiotic design (Check out the PDF document here and scroll down a little to see a large picture of it). ATI is making the FGL4 the way this behemoth should've been made to begin with. They're only manufacturing the FGL4 with dual DVIs out and are supplying dongle adapters for those poor schmucks who compete in the "Monitor Special Olympics" with lowly CRTs, if you catch my drift. 3D Labs, the geniuses that they are, decided to manufacture a board that not only requires an AGP Pro slot (no biggie), but also takes up the adjacent PCI slot because it's a two-board solution! You can NOT get around this with the GVX420. The attached PCI board holds the dual DVI outputs while the main board holds the dual 15-pin DSub analog outputs. Now not only do you have to worry about your motherboard being able to support a full-length AGP Pro board (I've seen many mobos place capacitors or other components a ways behing the AGP slot making it impossible to use a true full-length card), but you also may have to remove a PCI board to make room for this ridiculous contraption. I had to choose my "least important" PCI-based board and remove it to open up a slot for this Brontosaurus, which reluctantly fell to either my 3-port Firewire board or my SoundBlaster Live 5.1. Firewire lost and got the boot (I need my MP3s). Then I had to move my SCSI U160 and FastTrak 100 RAID controllers each down one slot which sent Windows 2000 crashing to earth faster than a lawn dart at terminal velocity. The term "BSOD" does this deranged exhibition of Micro$oft programming prowess little justice as I was certain that my system was going to spew the drive containing the offending, lame excuse for an OS from its bay. Fortunately, I needed to install Server anyway and all data was safely archived on an 8mm AME tape, so no harm done.
Once everything returned to "normal" (by Micro$oft standards), I installed 3DS Max 4, Photoshop 6, etc and ran the GVX through its paces. It's a sweet performer, especially in MAX. If the FGL4 turns out to be as fast as they're claiming, then true real time 3D modeling may be at hand, because I have some very large, complex models that the GVX handled with aplomb. I'm impressed. I don't play any games, not even Solitare, so I couldn't care less about how well my $1,500 graphics board performs in whatever gaming benchmarks the various sites use to gauge performance, although I'd like to see how it does running a true OpenGL game, just for kicks - but I'm not about to destabilize this crummy Micro$oft OS any further by loading a toy onto it.
Anyway, that's about it. It's a non-technical review, but I'm not an A+ dork anyway so I don't make myself out to be one.
I really just wanted to brag and rub it in to those less fortunate. As for me, I'll continue to enjoy graphic nirvana until something better comes out, like holographic displays.
Later.
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