Monitor advice needed - TFT/LCD n00b

[llama_man]

OK, so I think my 17" CRT is dying (it keeps making that "changing resolution" clunking noise and changing the width/height ratio).

I've previously steered clear of LCDs as they were expensive, but now the price has come down quite a lot and CRT seem to be going out of popularity for gamers.

My questions:

1. What kind of specs should I be looking for for a gaming monitor? I understand that I should look for an 8ms or less response time. But what about contrast ratios, etc?

2. Given my current rig (see below), is an TFT a bad idea? I've heard (please correct me if I'm wrong), that LCDs look pants if not displaying at native resolution. My current rig isn't going to play games at 1280, so will I be getting poor images if I buy a 17" / 19" TFT?

Sorry for asking such basic questions, but I've never paid much attention about TFTs before!

 

[strangestranger]

hmm should i help or not. basically this question has been answered many times. i would look up the latest 2 or 3 toms reviews. they will explain all. obviously you should never rely on the advertised latency to tell you anything about performance.

different monitors i believe have different scaling abilties but most will lokk o.k at non native res's. make sure to maintain aspect ratio when doing so though.

your comp aint that bad IMO and should be able to play most games without AA or AF.

 

[llama_man]

basically this question has been answered many times.

It's been answered pretty badly though. I just read one thread where one guy was trying to claim that a 400:1 contrast ratio meant that it could only display 1200 colours :roll:

 

[travbomb]

That guy was really confused about what he was talking about. Contrast has nothing to do with how many colors will be shown.

The Bit's in the panel determine the number of colors. Panels will generally be 6 or 8 bit which is right around 16 million colors give or take.