Looking for Tech Advice on buying a new Monitor

[Romeo Versace]

So I'm a pretty young guy still, been in the Desktop building and overclocking game for the past four years and am just now stable enough in my college life to really start spending money towards finally building my own behemoth. I've got my desktop coming together nicely and haven't even put $500 into her and am currently running with the following:
AMD Athlon II X4 645
6 GB of RAM DDR3 1600Mhz
Nvidia Zotac GT 545
HP OEM PoS Mobo/5400 RPM HDD

So it's not a bad system at all, I'm able to run Crysis 2 at Ultra and sustain a 40+ FPS at the highest loads with anisotropic filtering set at 16x.

Now here's my dilemma with taking the next step with this pay check, I'm not looking to cut a corner on the monitor what so ever like I did with the GPU while I wait for more funds to buy, for instance an SLI GTX 680 set down the road. My budget for the monitor is $200-300 which according to Newegg is more than enough for what I'm looking for, but I have to ask a question of a more intelligent community than my current friend base about this buy.

I'm entirely ignorant of the plethora of numbers occurring in the Monitor search. For instance I'm looking at Pixel Pitch, Display Colors, Contrast Ratio's and entirely unknowing of how they affect my eyes what so ever ya know?

I like going down to my local CompUSA and actually 'physically' looking at the monitors to buy one for myself, but not this time, I want to use Newegg's much more massive selection, I want to buy it once, and I want to abuse the hardware for years to come

So far, what I'm able to gather is these parameters for buying a new monitor for myself. I want the minimum resolution to be a 1680x1050 period. It's gotta be a widescreen. The actual patio I'm not to particular on. I need to be able to plug my desktop to the monitor as well as plug my Xbox 360 to it and swap back and forth between the screen seamlessly.

This is where the ignorance starts, I don't know if that's possible to swap back and forth with the Xbox/Desktop by just plugging a DVI (desktop) and HDMI (Xbox) and as simple as pressing the physical input key on the monitor; or if I'll need some type of a splitter? ((Not even sure what you would call that))

Next up is it's gotta be able to produce 1080p HD graphics for my Xbox, I've never once in my life been able to play a 360 in HD, so that's a must for this. Now I'm not sure if that means to be 'True HD' I need to be looking at a 1920x1080 minimum resolution for instance and I know you all can help me there.

Next setting I know for sure is the Monitor response time, I want the minimum to accepted to be a 3ms response, no 5's, and preferably a 2ms.

This is where my knowledge of the monitor's fails entirely, I don't know which brands aren't trustworthy for instance. I don't know what to look for in my Refresh Rate, Pixel Pitch, Brightness, or Contrast Ratio.

So I suppose it would be safe to say the overall theme of what I'm asking for is help defining those terms further than Wikipedia's loose definitions as well as help discerning how to plug the Xbox/Desktop together and have running seamlessly with a minimum accepted quality of 1080p HD graphics.

Thanks for the intellectual help in advance, been a Tom's Hardware reader for years now, first time poster and thanks again mates!

 

[Jrakon]

@Romeo

I have been researching like crazy as well the past few weeks and I have been very impressed with the ASUS line. I have a 21.5" ASUS and imo it beats the pants off of other monitors in terms of color quality.

I think this monitor would work great for you since you want to play 360 on it as well.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236091

Also it comes with a 30 day money back if you hate it.

Good luck in the search, there are tons of options out there but for your budget i think this is the best bet.

 

[Romeo Versace]

Woah, thanks for the find Jrakon. The only monitor so far that I had found meeting the criteria and looking appealing to me as far as screen size was this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009222

Yet with that ASUS monitor I'm gaining 4" in real estate and saving a cool $70. I'm not at all looking to go and get a 3D ready monitor, thanks again man!

Still going to hold out however to hopefully find someone with some definitions for me as what I'm finding using google talking about Pixel Pitch and Contrast Ratio's are primarily sales ploys without anyone really 'defining' the terms yet.

Thanks again though for pulling that monitor out for me man, I don't how I skimmed over it on my power search, time to read the feedback and hopefully avoid any time of ghosting.

 

[hang-the-9]

Two specs that are nearly useless to go by is response time and contract ratio. Almost no two makers use the same measurement for those. That is why you see some pricy monitors with a 1,000-1 ration and cheap ones with 10,000-1. As an example, not real numbers there.

Response time, anything around 10ms is fine, I have run a 12-14ms monitor (granted it was a high-end screen made for good colors and quality) with no blur during movies or games, and currently have a S-IPS based screen with a 8ms response that looks way better than any of the cheaper monitors that state 4 ms on the package.

For your price, take a look at the 20" or so Dell UltraSharp series, and also some monitor review articles or sites. A 22" monitor will have more than enough display size for anything short of watching a movie from across the room, and anything bigger, to me at least, seems like a pain to view at regular desktop sitting length.

 

[Romeo Versace]

Best answer selected by Romeo Versace.