9800 gx2 or gtx280 ??? 22 inch or 24 inch ??

hello guys, ive been reading forums for one month now, im going to build a new system, what i wonder is, shall i buy a 22 inch monitor and hence run all games ( like AOC and crysis ) in max settings and full AA, AF or do i get a 24 inch monitor and wait till a good card comes out? i just want to play AOC and crysis like games with max settings and full AA, AF. how much of a difference in gaming experience will the monitor cause ?? i mean will it be sooooo much fun with 24 inch monitor( at 1920 1200 res) or will it be that ill get used to a 22 inch monitor (1680X1050) and enjoy the games at its max resolution and highest settings, cos i think the max resolution for 22 inch monitors is 1680 X 1050 and todays top cards can give me good framerates at this resolution even with max settings and AA, AF. money is not an issue for me, im willing to spend around 2k on this rig, just that i dont want to spend all this money and get disappointed over the performance.
any help is appreciated. thanks in advance guys.

You want a 24" for either one of those cards, but a 30" would be best.

I would recommend an SLI setup for 30" LCD. monitors.

Assuming you are playing at native resolution, a 30" LCD has about 78% more pixels to push than a 24" LCD monitor; 132% more pixels than a 22" LCD monitor.

not to mention expensive, and humungo, how far back would you have to sit, and at the rez, ull need to fork over butloads of doe

oh, thank you very much , i think ill go for 24 inch monitor then, so i gotta wait for 4870x2 to avoid disappointment. i dont think a single gtx280 or 9800 gx2 will be enough for me to play at 1920X1200 resolution with max AA, AS. i did say that money is not an issue, but spending another $650 for another gtx 280 would be foolishness. id rather wait, i think you might agree

i didnt get u. 2 monitors ? more screen space ?? like how ??? do we keep the screens side by side or what?

oh windows extended desktop comes with windows. Just thought i'd add that in case you we're wondering.

My answer is 22. I made that clear in the first 2 sentances. The OP did ask me to elborate on my dual monitor side note. He did also post a price limit so 2k which when you include the screen is not alot so I feel dual monitor was worth mentioning in the first place.

While games my run fine now at 24" resolutions doesn't mean a good game won't come out that will require him to scale the resolution back a bit.
And when performance starts to become an issue I will take shader effects over higher resolutions any day.

Assuming the average 24 is 500, either of the cards doomturky suggested would only leave 900 for the rest of the system. This leads me to believe he'd be better off getting a 8800gt and waiting for the next round of cards.

thank you all for your suggestions