Hey guys,

I'm trying to get a clear answer here so I hope you can help me.

I'm about to change from a past decade old 17" CRT to an LCD for the first time. Going to get a 19' standard this time around and when more applications support widescreen then I'll upgrade.

For the moment though I know that the size of the lcd will give a 1280x1024 reso. I've been told that lcd worked best on their native resolution and even though that is obvious I would like to know how it responds to lower settings.

I'm an old school gamer. I play games like Master Of Orion 2 and I still love my Starcraft and Diablo to name a few. How would these look on an lcd? I would be really disapointed in getting a screen that couldn't show some decently my all time fav games.

If brand helps in this query. I'm currently looking at the Samsung 932BF and the LG L1900R - both at 2ms and at 2000:1 and 3000:1 respectively of contrast ratio.

Thx

Are you suggesting that these games can't cope with 1280x1024, or that your machine can't.

You should be able to set the screen to only use 1024x768and leave black borders round the edges, if your card can't handle it, and then get one that can. My 6600GT could handle most things at 1280x1024, so I don't see that you'll really have an issue, unless you are very old school tech as well.

Not sure of your choices, no opinion there.

Staying native will give you the best picture that your LCD can do, but for gaming it depends on the game weather or not it will still look good. Like Oblivion look great at lower than native for me while other games look horrible. What are your PC spec's?

Starcraft would not look quite as crisp as on a CRT, because the LCD has to interpolate to reproduce a resolution lower than its native. You'll notice the picture is softer.

The system is brand new. Intel Dual Core E6600 with Nvidia 8600gts, Vista, 4gigs of RAM. Just got it. Running it on the CRT atm. If Starcraft is not as crisps but still looks decent thats encouraging.

Get a decent LCD.

I've never noticed a difference in non-native mode on good LCDs.
Bad ones, i can't even look at.

can a 8600gts even run starcraft

i have 2 sammy 931c's and they are great...you will find new lcd's very bright if you have been using a 10yr old crt you will drfinitely notice a grat improvement.

enjoy

Well I finally took the plunged and aquired last night the Samsung I had mentioned. Wow!!! Talk about an improvement. I'm still tweaking the settings but already I am impressed.

After much research my fears about how older games would look like had abated a bit. I loaded up Master of Orion 2 and found out that I could play with native resolution by "changing" it to what was required for me to play (640x480 for this game). I'm not sure if that is standard but my video card allowed me this. It looks a tad bit soft but its nothing major.

Came with a DVI corde so I was all set. YAY!!!

Lock in the manufacturers native res that it states on the box and forget about it.

Also, in Windows use the clear type option and grab a proper driver, don't let it stick to Plug n Play. Also, set the Hz to the max you can, and pref use the DVI connection, LCDs work slightly better digital, also may be able to get better refresh rate. People claim that LCD doesn't refresh, but I am pretty sure that it does, otherwise why would the new tvs come out with 100Hz refresh? The refresh is the cap of your frames per second if i am correct, but I may be just talking out of my butt.