advice and opinions needed

Hey drdenby,

sorry it took so long for me to reply again. I work night shifts so I only post on the forums at night (UK).

I understand you have loads of questions and you want to make sure you are buying a good product for your hard earned money as I would do

I'll try to explain a bit more about monitors but I don't claim to be some expert. Just personal experience.

The higher the resolution gets the more taxing it's going to be on your graphics card. So if your graphics card could push let's say 70FPS at 1080p resolution it would only be able to push around 50 FPS on 1440p. This is just an example.

So as you can imagine if your card isn't strong enough to play games at acceptable frame rate at lower resolution then it would only get worse the higher the resolution gets.

You will also have to take into consideration what type of games you would like to play most. If you are not playing too many first person shooters you may enjoy an IPS panel better due to better color reproduction and better viewing angles. NT panels are usually preferred by FPS gamers due to faster response time and lesser input lag.

So to sum up roughly (this is by no means something you are forced to follow)

1. Establish how good your GPU is - can you play most games at a good frame rate at the resolution of your monitor. (Best way is to check reviews of your particular card and see how it works in different resolutions). It's kind of pointless having a beautiful high res monitor spoiled by low frame rate.
2. Decide what games you will play mostly.
a) FPS (first person shooters) - get an NT (Pros: faster response time, less inpout lage; Cons:worse colors, worse viewing angles - found some random video showing difference in viewing angles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWXcNlh85Ps)
b) RTS games (real time strategies) - get an IPS panel (Pros and Cons opposite to NT panels above)

Also budget - depends how much are you ready to spend - you need to find a good balance between price and quality.

I saw you asking something about refresh rate I think.
The thing is roughly explained like that - if your PC can push let's say 85 FPS in a certain game but your monitor's refresh rate is only 60 Hz you won't be able to "see" the 25 frames over the refresh rate. In some games you might actually get "screen tearing" if you don't enable v-sync (which would limit your frames per second to the refresh rate of the monitor i.e 60.

If your monitor is let's say 144Hz then you can enjoy a smooth gameplay all the way up to 144FPS BUT only if your PC can pruduce that many frames per second.

In a way it's overkill buying a monitor with higher refresh rate than 60 Hz if your PC will never allow you to play with more than 60 FPS. (I personally would always chose a 120+ Hz monitor but that's personal preference).

I hope I haven't confused you even further and haven't made making your choice even more difficult now.

Well, if you want you can tell me what is your CPU and GPU and the games you are interested in playing and I can tell you roughly what to expect. If not you can just google for your graphics card reviews. For example my Graphics Card is a KFA2 GTX 770 EX OC. So when I googled for reviews I found this http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/kfa2_geforce_gtx_770_ex_oc_review,1.html

This is just an example for my own card. The only thing you have to take into consideration when you are reading a review for your own card is to make sure and read what CPU they were using in the tests. If yours is considerably weaker than you will have to deduct a few frames per second from the results the reviewer has given for your card.

Hope this helps.

You are very welcome drdenby

I wish you to find the best monitor there is!