Questions about a 24" monitor.

[Summiner]

First off I am not highly technical at all, I mainly use my computer for playing video games and watching movies.

I just have a few questions about a 24" monitor.

1st: Will there be "bars" on the side of the screen while playing a video game, or will there just "more space" added on to the side? - The highest my resoultion will go is something like 1280 x 960 - I currently have a 19" LCD, if I put it to 1280 x 960 will it still look good?

2ed: My graphics card is: CHAINTECH SA5700L Geforce FX5700LE 256MB DDR AGP 4X/8X Video Card - Will this be able to support a 24" monitor?

3ed: I see alot of Dell 2405FPW 24" Ultrashard LCD Monitor's on ebay, they seem to sell for around 700-750. I was wondering if this was a good monitor for gaming / videos?

4th: And, while I am watching a movie now on my 19" there are black bars on the top and bottom of the screen - Duh its a widescreen movie - My questions is: Will there still be black bars on the top and bottom of a 24" or will the movie take up all the avaible space?

Thanks in advance for your anwsers.

 

[velis]

1. Depends on the game and monitor. Some games don't support wide resolutions so they'll play at 3:4 ratio. From there on it depends on your monitor if it can stretch the image which would not look good anyway so yeah, there will be bars.
2. I believe it should support it just fine for 2D work. Games however will run slow on such high resolutions.
3. Many people use this monitor and are satisfied with it. I personally don't have one so can't tell you first-hand.
4. Movies in 16:9 format will play without the bars, movies in 20:9 format will still have bars, movies in 4:3 format will have bars on the sides. You can always tell your codec to stretch the image, but too much stretching doesn't look good. 4:3 -> 14:9 might still be acceptable on a widescreen monitor reducing, but not eliminating the side bars.

 

[Nocturnal]

As long as you have a decent video card and the game you're playing in supports the resolution of the ws monitor then you should not have any problems.

 

[caz67]

Originally posted by: Nocturnal
As long as you have a decent video card and the game you're playing in supports the resolution of the ws monitor then you should not have any problems.

Thats right, if the vid card supports native res, no problems.

 

[AsianriceX]

I own a Dell 2405FPW so let me give you some first hand experience.

If you do get a 24" monitor, you'll probably be running it at 1920x1600, so you'll want to be using DVI.

In that case...

1: If you run at 1280x960 with DVI, the display will show 1:1 so the picture will be small and in the center... however, with nvidia's fantastic drivers, you can tell it to display stretched but with proper aspect ratio, so it will have a larger picture with bars on the side.

2: You'll be fine with 2D, as for 3D, you can run at lower resolutions and they all scale pretty well. Hell, I run Quake 4 at 1024x768 on my 7800GT so I can get higher and more stable framerates for multiplayer and it doesn't look horrible.

3: The 2405FPW is fantastic for gaming and videos.

4: There will be small bars at the top and bottom since the native resolution is 1920x1600 which is a 16:10 ratio. I think you can stretch it to get those last few pixels, but it's not really needed.