The blacks with this monitor are phenomenal. It's LED backlit which allows for deep, crisp blacks right next to bright colors. Next to the S231HL, my other monitors and even my HDTV (which is admittedly a cheapo model) look HUGELY washed out, and blacks look terrible.

The size is also a nice upgrade, as I've been working off my once-secondary 13'' monitor since my old 19 incher's power supply ate itself. I have SO MUCH desktop real estate. I've been playing Capsized at 1920x1080 and it looks gorgeous. Definitely a very great monitor.

EDIT:
Just ordered a Radeon 6870 to go with it. That'll be a nice step up from my GTX260.

Seems like an older model.
Either way, the blacks are epic when you compare cathode LCD to LED LCD. I own a SyncMaster BX2440 and an ASUS monitor and the SyncMaster is amazing. The biggest difference way the amount of light output. I turned it down to 50% and it still out shines the ASUS.

Question for you MoD, is the x1200 vertical resolution really that helpful? I have always heard people mention that 16:9 is what you want if you're using your monitor for cinema, not normal computing.

RCA wrote:Seems like an older model.

Question for you MoD, is the x1200 vertical resolution really that helpful? I have always heard people mention that 16:9 is what you want if you're using your monitor for cinema, not normal computing.

It is indeed an older model. It was on the shelf at Walmart for the right price.

As for the resolution...this machine is almost exclusively a gaming rig. I don't use it for movies or "normal computing" much. I do tend to prefer 16:10 for gaming, but 16:9 is still better than 4:3 when it comes to games. The natural human field of view is wider than it is tall, so it makes sense to emulate that in games.

Do you game in "windowed mode"? I can't NOT use windowed mode; oh you're loading, whats happening on NICO...

Also what is your desk situation? I have a tiny desk and I found that so many monitors take up a lot of desk real estate. These have been a god send for me. Adjusting height become more difficult but outside of that they are SO awesome.

I used frameless windowed mode where it's supported. I've got my CPU and GPU performance widgets off on my secondary monitor as well.

My desk has plenty of width for the 13'' and 23'' monitors side-by-side. It's a cheap-cheap-cheap Walmart pressboard POS that was leaning left at a good 20* angle until I tossed in a bunch of "real wood" corner reinforcements. It has an upper shelf above the monitors, but it clears them just fine. I'm considering building a mount to hold the 13'' monitor in portrait orientation. That clamp one you linked could work, but I wory about the durability of the pressboard I'd be clamping to.

MinisterofDOOM wrote:That clamp one you linked could work, but I wory about the durability of the pressboard I'd be clamping to.

You could try to pull it off by using something like this:


The scale is way off. Most likely "cheap-cheap-cheap Walmart pressboard POS" isn't as think as a represented it but you get my drift.