Mid-Range Buyer's Guide, September 2005
by Jarred Walton on September 19, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Display Recommendations
The final area that we want to discuss is the display choice. We've abandoned CRTs, as innovation has pretty much ceased, and the quality is getting worse relative to three years ago. LCDs are attractive, lightweight, space saving, and supposedly easier on the eyes over extended use. If you already have a good CRT, it might be worth keeping, and there are still some older model 21/22" CRTs that are worth buying, but we won't recommend any specific model here as supplies are limited. If you're looking for a large CRT, try to find one that has a 140 kHz horizontal scan rate or higher - that will allow 85Hz refresh rate at 2048x1536. Now, let's get to our LCD recommendation.
Price: $301 shipped (Retail)
The Acer AL1914smd is an 8ms response time LCD that performs very well in games and other uses. (At least it does to my less than stellar eyesight.) There are other LCDs that perform similarly or better, but they cost more. We've recommended the Acer display in previous Guides, and we have not yet found an LCD that can beat it on price/performance. The 6-bit color panel isn't the best, but most people won't notice the dithering that takes place. In addition, few people will experience problems with motion blur given the low response times. Of course, 8ms displays are no longer that special.
If you're willing to spend the money, you can now get sub-8ms response times - assuming that the marketing department is telling the truth. Viewsonic and several others are advertising 6ms and lower response times - Viewsonic even claims 3ms gray-to-gray response times on their VX924 19" unit. Some people are not bothered by motion blur even on 16ms LCDs, but others may notice it and may find it distracting. If you are irritated by motion blur with LCDs (try a few out in person), the 3ms GTG Viewsonic should remedy that problem. We must admit that with a refresh rate of 60 or 75 Hz for all the LCDs that we've used, we're a little curious to know how a 6ms response time can be measured, but hopefully, the worst case color transitions will still be under 12ms. However, getting a 19" LCD may not be the best idea - for gaming or business use.
Our advice is to get the absolute best display that you can afford and stick with it for a long time. I used a 21" CRT for 8 years (through at least as many computers), so quality vs. time is definitely in favor of buying a high-end display. My own upgrade just recently was to a Dell 2405FPW, and it's great - hopefully it will last at least five years, if not more. You don't need to go out and spend $900 or more on a display, but many people do just that. If you stick with the base 19" LCD recommendation, you'll be CPU/platform limited in the majority of games with a 7800 GT. For professional work, the native 1280x1024 resolution can also be limiting, although you can always go with dual LCDs if you need more screen real estate. We would strongly urge enthusiasts and power users to at least look at the 20" or larger range.
Price: Varies; look for under $500 sales
The Dell 2005FPW and 2001FP are a couple of great choices if you can grab one on sale for $500 or less. (Sales happen frequently on these parts, but they also sell out fast.) The 2005FPW is widescreen with a 1680x1050 native resolution, while the 2001FP is a standard 1600x1200 display. We'd go for the 2001FP, but it frequently costs $75 to $125 more than the 2005FPW, so it may not be worth the premium.
HP has similar sales on their LCDs, though they're usually still more expensive than Dell. Truly high-end users might even consider picking up something like the Apple 30" Cinema Display, though you'll need a card with a dual-link DVI connection for that. 7800 GT/GTX cards have one dual-link, as do several of the Quadro cards. Do some research before going this route. Long story short (too late!), it's basically very difficult to overspend when buying a quality display. It's one of the few components that can last half a decade or more without upgrades.
Just to reiterate, the Acer display that we've chosen to recommend is a good-not-great LCD. Upgrade to something better if you can spare the money and you won't be disappointed. Widescreen LCDs can be really nice as well, but getting games to work can prove frustrating. We suggest that you take a look at websites like the Widescreen Gaming Forum to make sure that the games you play are fully supported before going that route. We'd like to think that all future games will offer native support for WS resolutions, but Battlefield 2 has shown that even high profile games may not include proper support.
The final area that we want to discuss is the display choice. We've abandoned CRTs, as innovation has pretty much ceased, and the quality is getting worse relative to three years ago. LCDs are attractive, lightweight, space saving, and supposedly easier on the eyes over extended use. If you already have a good CRT, it might be worth keeping, and there are still some older model 21/22" CRTs that are worth buying, but we won't recommend any specific model here as supplies are limited. If you're looking for a large CRT, try to find one that has a 140 kHz horizontal scan rate or higher - that will allow 85Hz refresh rate at 2048x1536. Now, let's get to our LCD recommendation.
Click to enlarge.
Price: $301 shipped (Retail)
The Acer AL1914smd is an 8ms response time LCD that performs very well in games and other uses. (At least it does to my less than stellar eyesight.) There are other LCDs that perform similarly or better, but they cost more. We've recommended the Acer display in previous Guides, and we have not yet found an LCD that can beat it on price/performance. The 6-bit color panel isn't the best, but most people won't notice the dithering that takes place. In addition, few people will experience problems with motion blur given the low response times. Of course, 8ms displays are no longer that special.
If you're willing to spend the money, you can now get sub-8ms response times - assuming that the marketing department is telling the truth. Viewsonic and several others are advertising 6ms and lower response times - Viewsonic even claims 3ms gray-to-gray response times on their VX924 19" unit. Some people are not bothered by motion blur even on 16ms LCDs, but others may notice it and may find it distracting. If you are irritated by motion blur with LCDs (try a few out in person), the 3ms GTG Viewsonic should remedy that problem. We must admit that with a refresh rate of 60 or 75 Hz for all the LCDs that we've used, we're a little curious to know how a 6ms response time can be measured, but hopefully, the worst case color transitions will still be under 12ms. However, getting a 19" LCD may not be the best idea - for gaming or business use.
Our advice is to get the absolute best display that you can afford and stick with it for a long time. I used a 21" CRT for 8 years (through at least as many computers), so quality vs. time is definitely in favor of buying a high-end display. My own upgrade just recently was to a Dell 2405FPW, and it's great - hopefully it will last at least five years, if not more. You don't need to go out and spend $900 or more on a display, but many people do just that. If you stick with the base 19" LCD recommendation, you'll be CPU/platform limited in the majority of games with a 7800 GT. For professional work, the native 1280x1024 resolution can also be limiting, although you can always go with dual LCDs if you need more screen real estate. We would strongly urge enthusiasts and power users to at least look at the 20" or larger range.
Click to enlarge.
Price: Varies; look for under $500 sales
The Dell 2005FPW and 2001FP are a couple of great choices if you can grab one on sale for $500 or less. (Sales happen frequently on these parts, but they also sell out fast.) The 2005FPW is widescreen with a 1680x1050 native resolution, while the 2001FP is a standard 1600x1200 display. We'd go for the 2001FP, but it frequently costs $75 to $125 more than the 2005FPW, so it may not be worth the premium.
HP has similar sales on their LCDs, though they're usually still more expensive than Dell. Truly high-end users might even consider picking up something like the Apple 30" Cinema Display, though you'll need a card with a dual-link DVI connection for that. 7800 GT/GTX cards have one dual-link, as do several of the Quadro cards. Do some research before going this route. Long story short (too late!), it's basically very difficult to overspend when buying a quality display. It's one of the few components that can last half a decade or more without upgrades.
Just to reiterate, the Acer display that we've chosen to recommend is a good-not-great LCD. Upgrade to something better if you can spare the money and you won't be disappointed. Widescreen LCDs can be really nice as well, but getting games to work can prove frustrating. We suggest that you take a look at websites like the Widescreen Gaming Forum to make sure that the games you play are fully supported before going that route. We'd like to think that all future games will offer native support for WS resolutions, but Battlefield 2 has shown that even high profile games may not include proper support.
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GMAN003 - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
First of all, Great guide Jarred! Because of your article I am now an AnandTech member for life! @$$kissing aside, here are some of my questions and suggestions for your article.1) Would you have noticed any significant speed gains by using different memory types such as DDR500 memory as recommend by DFI on their website? Yes, I know, its more expensive, but for the enthusiast on a budget, wouldn't overclocking memory be more up my ally especially for any future processor upgrades?
2) For future guides, you may want to consider a more comparable AMD vs Intel office processor. From reading other articles on the web, isn't the AMD64 3800 X2 processor more comparable to an Intel Celeron D 830 processor? In fact, in some benchmarks I have seen the 3800X2 be faster than the Intel Celeron D 840 processor?
3) I bought almost every part in your gaming system for a friend, except for the case/pwr supply and hard drive. Rolling the dice with an Aspire X-Navigator 500watt just for looks and a Raptor74GB for seek/write times. Any future posts on what you have been able to reach as "stable" OC levels and what your detailed bios settings are would be appreciated. From what I keep seeing around the web, most of my framerates in my games should be in the high 100's FPS. :-D Needless to say, I'm happy with the advice.
Again, thanks Jarred.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 26, 2005 - link
Heh - old post that I never saw. Glad you liked the article. For overclocking, there are many options. I wrote a "Venice Overclocking" article that covers many of the questions you asked. I'll be doing an Athlon X2 followup.I tried to make it clear in the article that the X2 was far superior in performance than the Pentium D. Price was a consideration, and if there were a cheaper X2 than the 3800+, I would have happily used it. Personally, I'd say the 3800+ actually outperforms even the Pentium D 840 in most benchmarks, and only heavy multitasking with four or more processes will favor the Pentium D 840EE. Once you look into overclocking, it really becomes no comparison. 2.6 GHz on the X2 3800+ compared to perhaps 3.2 or 3.4 GHz on the 820.
Anubis - Sunday, September 25, 2005 - link
especially of an office computer SLI is totally useless, you could save 100$ on the office comp and about 70 on the gameing one by going with a non SLI NF4 moboJarredWalton - Saturday, October 1, 2005 - link
SLI was *not* recommended for the office configurations. The choice of the X700 Pro as the GPU should be clear evidence of that.Crescent13 - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
There are just a few minior things I would change...Jetway SLI motherboard instead of SLI-DR, it might be a bit better value for a mid-range gaming system.
I personally don't really like XFX, because they don't have that great of service and support, I would get an EVGA 7800GT, of course, that's just my opinion :)
I think I would get a hitachi 160GB SATAII hard drive, instead of western digital, hitachi has 8.5 MS seek time, western digital is 8.9 MS.
I would choose a forton source PSU, instead of SunBeam, for more stability.
I think the logitech x-530's would be a better choice than the labtec areana speakers.
this is all just my opinion, it's still a good guide :)
Googer - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
If you are running a Venice Core Processor why would you run PC3200? Venice is perfectly capable of running DDR500 with out over clocking. AMD Said So.Pythias - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
Because amd cpus benefit more form tight timings than bandwidth? http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid...">http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...amp;thre...SimonNZ - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
because low latency ddr500 cost a small fortune, well mine did anyhow and most people buying in the mid range of the market arnt going 2 notice the difference....hell i dont:PPythias - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
From what I gather you arent going to notice ddr500 over ddr400 whay spend more money?cryptonomicon - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
uh.."With the motherboard and CPU that we've selected, though, you should be able to reach much higher speeds than 1.80GHz. 2.40GHz (267MHz CPU bus with the stock 9X CPU multiplier) is about as sure of an overclock as anything that we've seen."
no. no overclock is guaranteed and i am pretty surprised i am seeing an advocation for overclocking in this guide. i overclock myself but a brazen statement like that is just inviting hoardes of people to try the board, and not even know what they are getting into. OCing should come into the picture on most gaming hardware but in this guide its more like the OC is sort of an assumed part of the value. i really hate seeing 'sure' associated with 'overclock'. that's just another 100, 200, 1000 people at dfi-street.com that i have to troubleshoot for because they don't know what they are doing. allright well that's just a rant, nothing personal.