My Gaming Rig

[TechAngel85]

Well the Asus I chose is a $160 monitor; however, being open box it's within my $130 budget. I'd never spend $600 dollars on a monitor. To me you're getting into professional quality in that price range and that's not what I'm looking for here. The most professional I get is Adobe Premiere from time to time and I don't do any graphic artistry. Just videos and gaming.

[Ubeogesh]

But still check out that AOC I've posted, it's much better than that ASUS.

 

BTW 600$ for a monitor is not incredibly much I think... It is definitely much for 24", but if you want 27" 1440p or 29" ultra wide that's a fair price. Besides in premium monitors you get a very decent chassis, height adjustment, sometimes even portrait orientation support and all kinds of features - usb 3.0 hub, cable management holes, decent integrated sound, all kinds of inputs (all four D-Sub, DVI, DP and HDMI), DisplayPort output (for multi-display setups), a nicer configuration menu, premium warranty with replacement even for 1 bright pixel and everything really feels solid.

A display is something you don't want to upgrade very often, so I think it is worth the investment (I had my previous monitor for 6 years or so, bought it for 400$, sold for 100$, bought a new one for 650$)

[phazer11]

For my next "big boy" upgrade I'm going with a superwide monitor (cinemascope) 21:9 probably IPS/LED Backlit. As far as monitors go I have to say I'm impressed with the one on my laptop, color depth and range is awesome and if anything I have a problem with it not having viewing angle problems for privacy's sake.

[Octopuss]

But still check out that AOC I've posted, it's much better than that ASUS.

 

BTW 600$ for a monitor is not incredibly much I think... It is definitely much for 24", but if you want 27" 1440p or 29" ultra wide that's a fair price. Besides in premium monitors you get a very decent chassis, height adjustment, sometimes even portrait orientation support and all kinds of features - usb 3.0 hub, cable management holes, decent integrated sound, all kinds of inputs (all four D-Sub, DVI, DP and HDMI), DisplayPort output (for multi-display setups), a nicer configuration menu, premium warranty with replacement even for 1 bright pixel and everything really feels solid.

A display is something you don't want to upgrade very often, so I think it is worth the investment (I had my previous monitor for 6 years or so, bought it for 400$, sold for 100$, bought a new one for 650$)

You don't need to tell me, hehe. What I have is 24" HP LP2475w, and it's awesome (there are some very minor annoyances, but the panel itself is just great). It's actually my 2nd one, because the first one died flying across the room because of my winning personality and buddha-like patience :D

 

P.S. Professional quality stuff starts roughly at $1500-2000 mark, imho :P

[Ubeogesh]

What I have is 24" HP LP2475w' date=' and it's awesome (there are some very minor annoyances, but the panel itself is just great). [/quote']

Wow that's 16:10 - it sucks :P

For my next "big boy" upgrade I'm going with a superwide monitor (cinemascope) 21:9

You won't regret it

I definitely can recommend my Dell U2913WM, it is awesome (the only thing bad about it is "Smart Video Enhance" feature which is turned on by default (easily turned off in settings) - it absolutely ruins all the gaming cause it switches color schemes whenever it wants which is very distracting)

[Octopuss]

What? Sucks? What are you smoking over there, what?! :P I can't stand 16:9. It's so vertically crippled I can't see jack **** on those things. Goddamn industry-pushed artificial trends! They kept bombarding the world with that nonsense for so long everyone eventually accepted it. Pff!

[Ubeogesh]

Ok, it's on. Rant shall it be!

It is natural for human to have wide field of view. The wider the display, the wider the field of view. You see more of the gaming world => more immersion! Just check out screenshots here: https://www.wsgf.org/dr/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/en

[Octopuss]

I must have weird eyes then, because it's disturbing to have edges of monitor in my view :D It just completely kills the gaming experience.

 

Besides, you don't always play games on your PC. And then 16:9 is punishing you for everything wrong you did in life :D

[Ubeogesh]

Wider displays are also better for multitasking. You can arrange 2 windows on a single 16:9 display side by side (I use this all the time at work - a lot of programs look good enough on a half of 1920*1080 screen - Skype, OneNote, Outlook in reading mode, many web pages, file explorer, MSSQL management studio) (you can also do this on 16:10 1920*1200 like yours, but there isn't really much benefit of extra 120 pixels below for the price of higher DPI (which is not great on Windows, since a lot of programs and icons look ugly if you upscale them)

On 21:9 (2560*1080) it gets even better - you can have 2 of any programs each on its half of the screen

[Aiyen]

It is a matter of getting used to it.... I used to know a guy who still up till like a year ago or so SWORE that he could not play on anything not 4:3... But was just really stubborn about change.

 

Imo then 16:10 is just a bit... meh... when you get up to the good monitors you pay quite a bit extra for the extra pixels, and they are nice for working on.. but for gaming I do not really see the difference.

 

Also increasing Skyrims FOV have so many annoying issues with it that it just looks stupid no matter if it is a 16:10 or 16:9 you view it on. Having way way way too elongated objects near the edges is personally much more distracting for me then the extra 120 pixels up or down.

 

As for windows use... if one starts to argue over the quality of the icons then.... I am at a loss for words lol :)

[Octopuss]

As for windows use... if one starts to argue over the quality of the icons then.... I am at a loss for words lol :)

 

lol noone said anything like that at all :P

 

So FOV is Skyrim is broken? Ugh... I also play BF4 and increase it from default 70 to 90 because it just looks so much better, so if it's not possible in Skyrim, I am a sad panda.

[Aiyen]

It is not broken... I just find it way more distracting then any difference between 16:10 and 16:9 would ever bring.

It is possible to use 90 in Skyrim just fine... I just find it looks really really weird ;)

[Nearox]

It's of course possible to increase FOV but it will also cost quite a bit performance in some circumstances ánd with Skyrim

 

[Ubeogesh]

I play Skyrim at FOV = 80 on 21:9. Stretched objects at side don't distract me at all, they're not that bad (don't tell me about performance drop, I use a 780 Ti :D). The only bug I see with larger FOV is that when I get really close to some wall, at the edge of the screen it disappears and I see through it. But that's really rare occasion. I first noticed it when I was running on Dawnguard castle twisted stairs and didn't rotate camera fast enough.

Shadow quality in my Skyrim is always super ugly though, no matter what FOV I set :( I try not to look much at shadows when I play :(

 

As for windows use... if one starts to argue over the quality of the icons then.... I am at a loss for words lol :)

lol noone said anything like that at all :P

I said - was talking about high-DPI monitors and that you might want have 125% GUI increase set up in windows for them. But I realized I was silly about it, 24" 1920*1200 doesn't have DPI higher than 24" 1920*1080, cuz its surface is larger.

[Octopuss]

Isn't default FOV 75? If increasing it causes some problems, 80 doesn't seem like it's worth it.

 

But speaking of PCs in general... I will be upgrading to Radeon 280x, which has 3GB of VRAM, and I am curious what kind of performance or how high settings could I expect with it. Rest of the PC is overclocked i7 3770K and 16GB RAM (that probably doesn't matter at all, Skyrim being damn 32bit application). I also don't intend to use ENB or anything of that kind.