Dell’s highly regarded FP2001 LCD monitor (20.1″, 1600×1200 native resolution) is on sale until tomorrow at Midnight. The price is $799, with free ground shipping. I ordered mine last night.
This monitor gets high marks both for general usage and gaming. It has a refresh rate of 16ms, both analog and DVI inputs, as well as S-video and composite inputs, and a contrast ratio of 400:1.
Considering that’s about what I paid for the 17″ ViewSonic I’m using day to day today, that’s a pretty darn good deal. Now I just need a video card with dual DVI outputs… 😉
Update: Simon Fell opened Pandora’s Box for me tonight. He noted that he had trouble finding a card that’d run 1600×1200 out of dual DVI outputs (something I don’t need to do yet, since I’ll be running one at 1600×1200 and one at 1280×1024).
In my research to locate an appropriate card, I came across this excellent piece of work: DVI Compliance Shootout. It does hard testing on the DVI outputs of video cards and shows which ones can be expected to realistically drive a display at 1600×1200.
Long story short: the ATI cards seem much better than the nVidia cards. However, I’ve yet to find an ATI gamer-worthy card with dual DVI outputs. The ATI cards with dual DVI are all in the FireGL family, which is their professional workstation graphics cards that focus on image quality instead of performance. nVidia chipsets seem to have a small smattering of dual DVI support, but this article really seems to indicate that they are a poor choice if your display(s) will be running at 1600×1200.
At this point, I’m not even sure whether my single DVI output on my existing card is going to run my new monitor well or not. Suckage. :-p