Edward, I was playing around with the same ideas recently, but found that anything above 30" is definitly not good if you want to actually work on the PC as well (mails, internet...) if you are sitting in front of a desk and not across the living room.

I've put my nose up to some 37" and 40" screens at the store, and the image is far from what you get from a true computer LCD at a normal "desktop" viewing distance.

Also, as I understood it (but could be mistaken...) most 1080p screens will only do "24p" which means 24 full frames of 1920x1080 a second. That is pretty slow for a computer game which might otherwise run at 30 to 45PFS, older games even at 60FPS (VSYNCH) on a true computer LCD.

Additionally, you want to check your framerate at such resolutions - not sure how well the 7950GS will hold up. In my experience (purely guesswork and some tests) it seems that higher res demands more pixel shader units, as there are more individual pixels to render. Simple textured polygon graphics (like IL-2 or FS2004) are performing pretty independent from screen resolution, but shaded/postprocessed games like Armed Assault clearly tie their performance mostly to the amount of shading work your card can handle.

I went from 1600x1200 at 2xFSAA to 1920x1200 at 2xFSAA, which is about 20% more pixels, and the results are pretty much a 20% drop in framerates for Arma and Stalker. If you're coming from a more common 1280x1024 res on your current LCD, the leap to 1920x1080 should be considered, and running lower res on such large a screen will look flat out ugly.


In the end, I settled for a 27" Dell 2709W which is a true computer screen, but at a more hardware-friendly 1920x1200 instead of the 30" 2560x1600. That's a screen I can actually sit in front and work at without my eyes starting to bleed, but at 600EUR not cheap. If you're short on cash, look for the Hanns-G 28" 1920x1200 screens which can be had for about 400EUR or less.