New 24in, gaming monitor, monitor selection is next to impossible.

[y0bailey]

Dudes and Dudettes (who am I kidding, just dudes here),

My 24inch 5 year old Dell (2405?) has a huge yellow center sitting in the middle top half. It is a hot, dying, ugly beast at this point. I loved it until the past week of staring at this off white center. It was a bit laggy, which I tolerated but hated.

Time for a replacement. IPS is all of the rage, but I honestly am not that huge into photo/video editing, and I mostly browse the web and play FPS games. My office is SMALL, and the thought of LED backlighting to keep this room from heating up so bad seems nice (I can feel the Dell heating the room).

I don't have any serious budget (would like to keep it under $500 if possible), but the cheaper the better (more around $300ish would be an easier sell to the wife).

Help me out. Honestly researching LCD's is about 1000x harder than anything else related to hardware. My head is spinning.

 

[Sycraft]

Well I love me some IPS because it is just has such nice colour and viewing angles. However, if that isn't an issue, well then Dell has a nice cheap LED backlit 24" in the form of the ST2420L. It is like $220. Nothing special, just a basic 1920x1080 TN panel with an LED backlight, but it should do the trick.

Really if cheap and LED backlit are your criteria, don't worry about it too much. Find one you like the looks of and get it. None will have a superb panel, in fact they probably all use the same panel. If Dell did the trick for you, I don't see a good reason not to stick with them.

Only start to worry about it if you want a nice LCD. Then you start talking more about tradeoffs in terms of what kinds of high end features you'd like.

In terms of LED backlit displays they are almost all cheapies. Reason is LED backlights don't give as nice and uniform a light, so higher end displays all tend to use CCFLs. Only exception I know of is Apple and not only does that blow your budget rather badly, but you'd be buying used as Apple has discontinued their 24" display, they only sell 27" now.

 

[jsteinm1]

I just purchased two HP 2511x ($270) monitors and I absolutely love them. I haven't had a chance to game on them yet so I can't speak for that, but I did watch some BF3 HD trailers and it all looked good to me. If you would prefer CCFL, the 2509b ($210) is cheaper, 3ms response time and should fit your needs. The other monitor that I almost bought before I got the HPs was the Samsung BX2431 ($250)

A note on the HPs is they are glossy screens, which I prefer and thats why I chose them. If you like anti-glare then I would say the samsung.