24" LCD/old video card

[duffyfs]

I follow this topic on a regular basis and benefit from it, but this is my first post. I currently run a 19" NEC Trinitron crt off a P4 2.8 cpu and a HIS (AGP) 128mb 9800 Pro gpu on a gamer that I built 5 years ago. I know this is old stuff, but I'm on a fixed income now and it will take me some time to put together the parts for a new rig. I would like to get a 24" LCD that I could use on my present gamer, but I would like to find out in what ways my system might limit its performance. My gaming consists of flight sims and COD. The rest is internet, Photoshop, MS Office and some TurboCad. I recently built a system for a friend around an Asus Maximus, 4870x2, and NEC 2490, so I've seen what great looks like. Thanks for any input. I also posted this on the Anandtech forum yesterday. Lots of views, no replys. I did search the forums first.

 

[lawless2142]

Even the newest COD games (WAW and MW) run very well on hardware that's 1 or 2 generations old. So you might want to upgrade to a cheap card like a Radeon 3850 or GF 8600. You'll be limited in resolution (probably 1440x900 max), but it should be playable. Also the 9800Pro might not be able to run DVI 1920x1200.

Flight sims are considerably more harsh. FSX for example runs like crap on all but the highest end systems, and even then you're talking 30fps. There's so much in the background being calculated constantly. A high end CPU is better in those instances.

As for a 24", you most likely won't be taking great advantage of a 23-24" LCD's native resolution of 1920x1200/1080. With the older system you're resolution limited in almost everything.

That's not necessarily bad though, as there are plenty of LCD's with VERY good scaler chips that can make low resolutions look very sharp and defined. My HP w2408h is one of these. Instead of a blurry mess, it scales low resolutions like 1024x768 up to native without a loss in sharpness. There is a slight unsharp mask type effect, but it's not unpleasant. It also has aspect ratio scaling and 1:1 scaling options. Consider these important.

Noticing your other interests though, I would most certainly stay away from TN based 24" displays. These extended gamut and TN displays are usually very inaccurate for color. It takes quite a bit to calibrate then to within even 2-3 delta of color accuracy. Look for anything S-PVA/MVA based. You can identify these by a response time of 6ms and viewing angles of 178 degrees. Most of the newer *VA panels are coming with RTA enabled.