What monitor are you running? I'm after good image quality. I've become accustomed to Apple displays but don't really want to drop another grand on an Apple LED cinema screen for a PC.

It's not that hard to understand which panel is being used by looking at the specifications. TN panels always have bad viewing angles, so when you see something like 170/160 it's probably TN. IPS and PVA are usualy at 178/178.Also, TN are the fastest of those three main types. Both IPS and PVA's have at best 5 to 6 ms lag. Good TN panels have 2-3 ms. That's why they are prefered for gaming monitors. That, and they much lower price.

Also, try http://www.prad.de/ for monitor reviews (it's in english btw).

Thanks Remon, great link, will have a browse through their reviews.

samsung syncmaster 305T--i like it a lot

i would recommend this Dell S2409W 24" 1080p Wide Screen LCD Monitor for $179 ,
Specs:
Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (1080p)
Contrast Ratio: 1000:1 Typical
Response Time: 5ms
Viewing Angles: 160 Horizontal / 170 Vertical
Inputs:
1 x HDMI
1 x VGA
1 x DVI-D

Pepper, you definitely aren't speaking for anyone but yourself here.

I have a 27" 1920x1200 Dell, and it is perfectly acceptable with 2x or 4x FSAA. It's still higher DPI than the very common 19" 1280x1024 so why shouldn't it be "gameable"?

The other argument which you are leaving out is that 2560x1600 to power a 30" require an awfully strong GFX card, so if one wants a large field of view (for immersion) but doesn't want to buy dual core GPUs, this is the happy medium. I came from a 20" 1600x1200 and that one actually was a bit too small for my liking.

I would recommend Dell for their very nice panels and dark black, but right now they are being stupid in doing away with 16:10 and pushing 16:9 which is unacceptable for PC use IMHO.

Hans G has great prices, but quality seems a tad hit & miss.

fair enough,to each his/her own. gotta say though, from my experience, it doesn't take a dual core GPU to power today's games at 2560x1600 and high settings (though at that res. i don't miss FSAA that much if i don't enable it). my radeon 4800 does it quite well, and that was around $200 i think.

I'm not sure 2560x1600 (on 30") without FSAA is much better than 1920x1200 with 4x FSAA as far as "blockyness" goes.

If you could run 2560x1600 at least with 2xFSAA fine - but that would cost 20% performance on most of today's cards.

Also price wise the advantage is clear - my 27" Dell was about half of the 30" Dell. There's no linear scaling here.

Going 24" 1920x1200 OTOH is too small a screen IMHO. It's not the TV-Feeling.

I may not have all the tech specs and other stuff, but the thing is fine by me. It has no pixel problems, no bands of different shading, is fast in response time, and has a large immersive view. I'm not doing graphic design. I bought the system and monitor to help with my next phase of Private Pilot training. Navigation, instruments, and cross-country. I wanted to be able to run FlightsimX and have a large monitor to get bettter impact than what I had. A 30 in was almost 2/3 of what I payed for the whole system. My main purpose was to save money on flight time by doing a lot of the procedure work on the computer. That and having a decent set-up for gaming etc.

Once I get it all set-up, software installed, etc I will tell you how it works for me. Right now they have delayed my shipping date until next Monday because of the ATI 5870 card.

Just did some quick math.

A 27" diagonal 1920x1200 monitor has 7033 pixels / square inch of screen.
A 19" diagonal 1280x1024 monitor has 7443 pixels / square inch of screen.

The screen aspect ratios are not the same so you have to do a more involved pixel per area calculation. Granted the difference is less than 10%, but the 19" 1280x1024 monitor has a higher DPI value.