Waspy :
OK let's assume you have a Supreme Commander/Crysis junky, he wants Quad Core for the slight FPS increase in SupCom, and good graphics for Crysis. Now let's assume he also watches a bunch of movies/shows with his girlfriend from a reasonable distance away. Because of this he is also dropping some cash-money on a 30" monitor.
So he basically needs SLI for the SupCom/Crysis at a very high native resolution. Space on the mobo may be an issue too, where it must support two nVidia cards which take up two slots for the extra cooling.
What motherboard would support this best? Probably something 780i as those have better support for 45nm Quad Cores in general?
Get a 20" LCD for gaming They have better response times, most of the 30" units seem to have quite sluggish response rates the lower number of pixels on the screen means you will get better performance for less money spent on graphics cards. Spend the cash difference between the 20" and the 30" on a good dlp projector the 30" monitor will feel tiny in comparison! My movie screen is 8 feet wide (horizontal not diagonal)! Its surprising just how quickly you get used to big displays for movies. 50" screens seem small to me
Personally I dont feel the need to have overly large displays for gaming, and a 2560x1600 will have next to no image quality benefits over a 1680x1050 display! The higher resolutions on LCD's are not truelly higher resolution (as in pixels per inch) they are just more pixels for a larger display area the pixel size remains much the same (hideously huge to my eyes)
Personally I still like old CRT's scaleability is great. I have a monitor that can run 640x480-2048x1536, with a pixel pitch of 0.21 you just dont get LCDs with pixels that small. I can maintain my image size and change the resolution to get the performance I want in games. The problem is CRT's are getting hard to find and the second hand market is none to reliable
. One of my CRT's died recently and I tried a 21" Trinitron replacement, great for brightness, contrast and refresh rate but the pixel pitch is 0.24 I can really tell the difference between this and the monitors with the lower DPI
I can also tell the difference in a big way between this and my brothers Samsung 206 BW with a 0.258 pixel pitch...
Unfortunately despite being advetised as first class condition one corner of the new screen has a slight purple tint. Not happy at all. To my mind CRT is the best technology for image quality, but unfortunately old CRT's are hit and miss as to whether or not you get a good one
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I would consider the projector, and smaller screen combo, you can also then run your games through the projector from time to time, imagine playing crysis life sized
Personally I use my projector for playing Gran turismo 4 on the PS2 from time to time, got a bucket seat and steering wheel and an 8' wide image in front of you. great stuff
Of course you do need space for a projector.