is it like this--
https://www.aulro.com/afvb/images/im...011/09/971.jpg
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is it like this--
https://www.aulro.com/afvb/images/im...011/09/971.jpg
I can reccomend one of these--Quote:
Originally Posted by VladTepes
Dell UltraSharp
If you're happy to keep using your old screen and it only has the VGA connector (A.K.A. DSUB, the blue one Pedro posted), you can easily get DVI to VGA adapters. They're $5 or so, I've got one on my old screen so I can continue using it as a secondary monitor. I'm not sure if the manufacturers still bother, but a lot of graphics cards used to come with a DVI to VGA adapter bundled in the box.
gamedude are cheap parts, but absolutely atrocious service. don't expect any support from them and if you need to send anything for warranty expect big delays as all warranty is handled by the suppliers and or manufacturers, they will not warranty swap anything for you even if it is less than 24 hours old. "it will need to be sent back to the supplier for exchange"
been there, never again.
p.s. didnt realise i had my cranky pants on today until i reread my post :)
Yes but therels another different plug next to it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift
Yeah com[aring here
Monitor Cable Connectors
it is I am pretty sure a DVI plug.
That's not at all uncommon on screens built in the last 3 years. If you want to save money there's really no reason to upgrade. That being said you'll find screen prices are much cheaper than they have been in the past, you can get some good quality screens with a large size and plenty of input options for around $300.
There's a good write up on screens in the October issue of PC Power Play. It covers the different technology types, what they're good at, what price you can expect to pay and also reviews some screens too. There's also some info in a different article on what they think is a good computer configuration for a given budget ($1000, $2000, $3000 and money no object), it sounds like that could be helpful for you as well.
I grew up playing computer games, starting with the BBC micro and ending up with water cooled overclocked stupidities. The worst aspect of using a PC to play games (or possibly the best, depending on how you look at it) is that the hardware changes so fast.
In the 90's I bought a Play Station. All my Play Station games still work on it. Since then there have been 2 new versions of the Play Station. As far as I know, most if not all PS1 games will play on the latest PS3.
In the same time, PC's have undergone a vast number of changes. Almost no component of a 90's PC will work in a 2011 model. Even 5 year old hardware is largely incompatible with current production. Most new PC games will struggle on hardware that was top of the line even 2 years ago. Equally, most 90's games will refuse to work at all, or require a great deal of tweaking to run on a 2011 PC.
So the choice becomes either buy "the best" and get perhaps 2 years of new games, buy "average" and hope that the current crop of games will play, or buy a console and know that any games produced for that console will work..........
Considering that most games these days seem to come out on all platforms (except Wii), the sensible money would be on the latest version of an XBox or Play Station.
If you must have a PC, remember that most graphics cards based on a given chip are pretty much the same "reference design". So whilst two brands may vary in price, they may be basically the same card with different stickers.
An NVIDIA GTX580 powered card is about the best "single processor" unit you can get, the dual processor cards are far more money and few current games use them to any degree (and they're out of stock, almost all brands, at the moment!). Find a brand with a good price on an GTX580 (try Palit).
Then stick it on a motherboard with an Intel Z68 Express chipset with an i7 2600K processor and about 8Gb of DDR3 (1600+) RAM. A couple of WD Caviar Black drives, a Blu-Ray drive, a 1000W+ PSU and bingo... Gaming! you'll just about scrape that lot for $1500-$1700, but you'll also need a case and a copy of Windows.
Just don't buy a new Microsoft Touch Mouse. The worst mouse I've ever used....
interesting post Warb,
just finished reading some developers blurb on Deus Ex Human Revolution and they were complaining about the hardware not being up to spec so they could make the game as they wished, so what was released i gather isnt as full on as they had hoped. That's kinda scary in a way and goes along with what you are saying.
As a computer saleperson i usually recommend people not to buy top of the line as even top of the line is already out of date as soon as it hits the market, i recommend to buy what works now and suits the budget and then concern yourself with whats in the future when the future becomes the present.
most people upgrade pc's in the 2 - 3 yr range anyhow, and by that time when all the new games are out the new hardware will hopefully be out as well.
just whatever you do, don't make the mistake of buying a PC that is going to last you for the next 5 - 10 years as i commonly have people wanting to do. ( ok if you don't change what you are going to do with it in the next 5 - 10 years you might get away with that, but can you promise that's definate ? )
i myself upgrade roughly every 18 months, i buy mid range where you get the best bang for buck.
my current game pc is a Toshiba laptop, and its only got a NV GT330m 1gb card, but plays all games i play at a good frame rate and good resolution (including Deus Ex HR), sure not as good as some high end machines, but hey, are we buying pc's to use? or are we buying machines to impress other people with stupid high end specs? :)
Off topic:
An interesting question to consider is why is all the new horsepower actually needed? Certainly some games have complex graphics that need power to run at high frame rates, but.....
In the mid 90's I was told by Microsoft that they had taken their software about as far as it could go. Whilst they were working on information storage that did not require the user to know where a file was, which I guess ended up as "libraries" in Windows 7 and "the cloud" on the internet, they stated that there was little more they could do to add functionality. As a result, they were working only on the "user experience", ease of use and appearance.
Add to this the fact that in the old days (!) we used to be concerned with maximising performance of software, given that we had limited CPU cycles and storage to play with. Then came the "4GLs". I remember using one to rewrite a big month-end suite on an HP mini computer using Image databases, it took a few days for me to replace a system that had taken a team of COBOL programmers months to code. It was so simple to code a data entry system, I could knock out a bespoke sales system for a national company in days - a prototype could be produced during a meeting, so the users could actually see what they would get. But almost instantly we had to add hardware......... those wonderful old HP 300Mb hard disks the size of a bar fridge (remember the computer room scene in Terminator 2?) were replaced with HP "Eagles". In the late 80's or early 90's I walked in to the office with a brand new 300Mb drive the size of a ciggie packet and people fainted - the 1985 IBM AT had a 5 1/4inch full height hard disk of 10MB!!
Then later (contracting to a pharmaceutical company) I was astounded to be told that a new system from a contract software house needed several GB of RAM to run. By modern standards that doesn't seem a great deal, but the previous system had run on a system with far less, and servers of that era were considered fairly top-end if they had more than 512Mb!. Eventually the system was run using terminal server because in client-server mode it used more network bandwidth than could be provided.
The exponential increase in hardware performance has, I suspect, removed any pretext of optimising code performance. Every new version of an OS, or a piece of software, demands more storage, more CPU, more RAM etc. But a word processor still only types letters.....
However, a gentleman to whom I supplied a PC maybe 15 years ago is still happily using it without any problems. If it goes wrong he's stuffed (unless I happen to have spare parts!) but apart from that his copy of Windows 95 still plods along allowing him to record whatever it is he puts in his Excel spreadsheets. It works as well now as it did when it was new. He's lucky enough not be be interested in the internet, or games, or constantly upgrading to get more colours.....