Widescreen Gaming Forum

A couple days ago i sold my 3 awesome 24" TN dislpay, for 3 slightly smaller 23" but more awesome IPS displays - the award winning ASUS PA238QR 23" IPS - pricematched at $208 (a STEAL of a price for IPS displays)

1. IPS viewing angles really showed its true strengths on the far left/right monitors - did not have to turn the side monitors in as much due to colour shift - reduced Fish Eye effect!


2. Colors were generally a tad bit better due to the IPS (for image professionals*) - but my old displays were almost identical

and i LOVED Portrait Mode

1. Browsing was better, most site have a lot of content and arent generally formatted for 16:9 displays


2. Reading documents (ie comics) was awesome, display the full page without scrolling? Yes please.


3. 3x1P had increased vertical resolution is really nice - and does not suffer from "Fish Eye" effect as much as 3xL surround


4. HUD problems no longer exist because its still 16:9, no weird behaviour in even the best "supported" Eyefinity games

But there were cons to Portrait Mode

1. The Bezels were much more pronounced in 3x1P


2. at 23" these IPS monitors only had 1080px when in Portrait mode, some websites did not fit properly :( I found myself dragging some sites to another monitor in Landscape mode when Portrait pro's was not enough to outweigh the cons

Then i realized - "Wait...did i just drop close to $700 (including taxes) on 3 monitors?!" (in manitoba we just introduced the recycling fee of $9.25 per display) and $30 on fees? Holy crap i can get a way better single monitor to avoid the bezel/portrait mode problems"
- So now im thinking of returning them (luckily memory express has a 7day full refund/exchange policy) and grabbing this badboy HP ZR2740w 27" IPS which i can pricematch to be $685 - and i save $20 on that fee (since i just pay for the one monitor)

1. No Bezels!


2. Higher Resolution for one monitor (2560 x 1440)


3. Websites should display perfectly fine at Portrait mode 1440px


4. Bigger monitor!

I keep all the IPS goodies, but lose the downsides of bezels/fisheye/weird HUD. Another plus side is that even rocking Radeon 6970x2 (Crossfire) i had to turn off some settings (AA/HBAO/etc) to get it to run at 5760x1080 and still keep 60fps, at a "lower" resolution of 2560x1440 - i can get those goodies back!

But one thing im wondering...will i really miss the extreme surround Hor+ gaming?

I hope not :(

So far im talking myself into switching..seems to be alot more pros than cons - the only thing i worry about is the 12ms reponse time of that 27" monitor, luckily it has an "overdrive" feature than compensates for this and review sites (as well as user feedback say the ghosting/tracing is not noticable) and the insanely in-depth review at http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/hp_zr2740w.htm says the input lag is class 1 - CRT level and the response time should be fine even for high-level gaming

Any criticisms on my thought process? Thanks for reading!

You will miss it, case and point.

I've been playing Bf3 on my 5870 until my new PSU comes in. I've had to play on a single monitor to get any good performance.
At 2560x1600 or 2560x1440, I feel blind. Like I cant see enough, so I made many custom resolutions:
2560x1200, 2560x1080, 2560x900, 2560x800, 2560x768, 2560x480 (Actual Eyefinity Aspect Ratio)

The smaller the vertical, the more I saw in Horizontal FOV, but the smaller it got, the more I felt cheated.
You start not being able to see as far as you used to as the screen infront of you becomes less detailed.

I ended up playing BF3 at 3840x800 fullscreened on my 3 monitors because I didn't want to give up the immersion.

Don't get me wrong, I still cant see far off, but I'm loving it way more this way.

If you want to go bigger, I'd say save up and go bigger in a big way.

I made the jump from 5760x1080 to 7680x1600. Going 7680x1440 seems to be popular lately. Especially with all those korean 27" 1440p monitors for cheap on ebay. $300 a pop.

_________________
System Core: | Intel Core i5-2500K + ASUS P8Z68-V + 16GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333 MHz | Win7 x64 | MSI R7970 Lightning 3GB [1105/1400] |
Display: | 3 x Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP-HC @ 7680x1600 | Dell u3011 |

What's the point of going to 27"? It seems neither here nor there. Go up to a 30" instead if you're gonna shell out the money.

I know one avid Warcraft 3 player who found out that
30" is way too big
27" is manageable
24" is his sweet spot

Bigger is not always better. Each to his own I guess.

I think the added immersion provided by side monitors gets most people excited about multimonitors which you didn't mention at all. Did you not value this feature or maybe you didn't really notice it if you were running in portrait?

I don't see negatives as bad as some people make them out to be. Bezels, fisheye, multimon hud, increased comp requirements are all part of PC gaming like modding.

There are a lot of pro's to multi-monitor gaming. However, there are plenty to a single screen as well.
Less heat/cost with one screen and driving them (count the users of crossfire/sli on this forum!) Not to mention update, update, update!
Widescreen is native in todays world. Multi is not always.

Honestly I looked into it, but for the cost of gear, electricity, and my time (I'm fearful I'd do nothing but game); it wasn't worth it to me. For instance; I am still running my 2006 purchase that WSGF originally helped me find. With a display size of 1680x1050 a simple 550Ti keeps everything spinning at high textures and AA/AF.

That being said, I do want a 30" monitor for light gaming and photo/video work.

That doesn't really make a lot of sense, move the monitor further away and adjust the height if people think it's too big. Either way the image is going to be more crisp (higher PPI).

If you could find a 27" 2560x1600 monitor I guess that would be pretty great, most I've seen were 1920x1200 which at that point were just larger PPI 24" monitors (everything looks more pixellated at the same distance). The few 27" 2560x1600 I saw were close to the same price as a 30".

3x1 portrait hands down!