I just bought myself a brand new Acer X173w.
I know I said before that I was going to buy a 19 incher. But I find this monitor at IDR 1.630.000, which is a bargain, and I didn’t have the extra cash to get a 19 incher. Therefore, I bought an X173w.
Now I’m gonna tell you what I think about it.
This is the first LCD monitor ever set foot on my house, so I eagerly hooked it on my PC, tried some games, and lost track of time. Seriously, this happened.
One of the reason might be that this monitor bears a whopping native resolution of 1440x900, compared to 1024x768 that I used in my old CRT.
Do the math, and you’ll realise that this monitor packs 1,6 times as many pixels as my G74 (1.296.000 vs 786.432) on the roughly same screen area. This is both a good thing, and a bad thing.
The good news is that I get a very smooth image. I can barely perceive individual pixels on it if I put my face 10 centimeters from the screen. So gaming feels great now, even without enabling any Anti-aliasing.
The bad news, on the other hand, is that 1440x900 is the only resolution this monitor can display nicely. I tried 1280x800 and 960x600, both displayed intolerably ugly.
This means that whenever I’m gaming, my graphics card needs to pump more pixels to the screen than before. As I wrote above, 1440x900 has 1,6 times more pixel than 1024x768, If at the smaller resolution I’m getting low frames per second, then the game will be rendered unplayable at the greater resolution.
This is not a problem yet, my faithful 8600GT can deliver smooth game play to 1440x900 at most games that I play, *cough*except crysis*cough* and if I still get bad frame rate, I can just remove some bells and whistles until the frame rate is acceptable.
But what about future games? How do you know whether you can run it or not?
It is easy, really. I only need to find some benchmark on 1280x1024. It should perform pretty much the same. But yes, a graphics card upgrade is still called for, not to mention the fact that I am looking forward at Far Cry 2. I’m just gonna have to wait.
Now, if you excuse me, I have some games I need to play.
