So I'll be making a nice gaming/programming PC this winter...

I will also be watching TV on it, etc. Should I go w/ the two 19" screens or the 1 24"?

If I get two 19" screens and the dual input TV tuner, I can watch two things at the same time, right? Watching and playing at the same time is very tempting.

If you're watching movies, I'd say go with the 24.

I've got a 20.1 inch Dell widescreen, and it's great for gameing if you're at the computer desk, but(since the PC is my room) if I watch TV or movies from my bed, the screen is just a tad too small, and I really think that a 24inch would have been a wiser choice for me...
That said, with the 24inch, games wouldn't run as well unless you had an expensive PC since the resolution is MASSIVE(1920 x 1200).

So yeah, 2x 19inch should be great if you aren't gonna leave your desk chair.

As for watching and playing? Don't count on that unless your PC has some really good video cards, cause the Digital TV tuners use your video card to process the signals. So if you try to play a game while the TV tuner is running, both the game, and the tuner will take a bg performance hit.(Tv goes all jumpy and the game's framerate drops immensely)
That's from my experience with 6800GTS video card, but if you get say, a 8800GT or something like that, they'd take less of a performance hit.

Id personally go for two screens, only because my PC isn't really a media machine and it would be cool to have a second screen so I could have internet on one, MSN/Media Player on the other and other wacky combinations.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts guys, whacky combinations are tempting but I think i'm gonna go with the 24" for now. 2 24's? Now that's a thought! :nooo:

I have a single 22" and I love it. Perfect for watching TV on, and also fantastic for multi-tasking.

I think if I had two I would most likely just focus on one monitor and the other would go to waste. Although I am tempted to get another monitor.

I'd say go the single widescreen unless you use your PC for work as I do in which case dual monitors is your best bet.

Life is so much easier for me being able to look at analytics programs in one screen and write my reports on the other.

Of course once I've upgraded my CPU so it is no longer the bottleneck my 8800GTX despises then I'll be trading in one of the 19"s for a widescreen.

I think I would probably with a widescreen as my main monitor and a squarescreen(:P) as a secondary monitor.

Ideally they'd have to be the same height in resolution and cm.

I may have already done that by now if I had the room for it.

It really runs down to how sexy your GPU is. If it's some rubbishy model from three years ago, you might as well forget it, because the max. resolution it probably even supports is 1024x768 (like mine, FOR SHAME), and buying a 24" monitor would be a complete waste of money. :D

However, if you've got a pretty spanking GFX card, then by all means buy the bigger screen. I dunno about dual monitors: to be honest, I would only buy two to make myself look more nerdy than I currently am. :P But if programming is what you're gonna be up to, then you'll have multiple apps running at the same time, so having two monitors might be pretty handy.

By all means, sacrifice sense for sex. If a better monitor will make your games look like orgams, then by all means buy the 24". Size does matter after all. :P

I have a 20" widescreen and a 17" 4:3 so I have the best of both worlds. :P

Dual monitors which is awesome for work stuff
Widescreen which is awesome for watching movies, digital TV and later on 360
Plus the single 4:3 monitor is handy for those games that don't support widescreen resolutions

Plus with the 17" having a resolution of 1280x1024, and the 20" widescreen having 1680x1050, the screens are almost the same height, so they just about line up perfectly :D

I could not stand it if the two monitors didnt line up properly, it defeats the purpose really.

Hmmm, I've been tossing up between this same conundrum. Though I was debating between 2x22" or 1x24". I'm thinking the 22" inch monitors will be a better bet, but I need to find a decent pair that can be rotated into the portrait position. I've got a few other priorities to spend money on at the moment though, so I'm not really in a rush to pick something out.

Anything over 20" would be unbelievable for a dual monitor setup. If I could afford it i'd definately go for it.

I already have a 19" monitor, so if I was going to upgrade, I'd likely just buy a second one for dual monitor action, but even then it's a hard choice... But I think other people have covered this quite well in saying that unless you have a hardcore compy then 24" will be hard to game on, but I suppose you could possibly just run games at lower resolutions and set the display settings to use centred timings so the aspect ratio wouldn't be affected but there'd be black bars at the sides of the screen, so that could possibly be a workaround for that... If you have a decent computer, I'd probably think a 24" would be more impressive than 2 x 19" - also, is it even possible to have dual monitors with 22" or 24" because they run at such high resolutions and most video cards only run a maximum resolution of 2048x1536, but say you have 2x24" monitors through one PC that'd be 3800x1200 resolution, which is just crazy - that wouldn't be do-able is it?

I'm pretty sure that there'd be a way to do it via multiple GPU's.

Don't quote me though.

I'm getting a secondary monitor Wednesday.
It's nothing special, a 15" LCD to compliment my current 19" CRT.
It's only a secondary monitor to have Media Player and other secondary applications on, but it will be useful.
And for $100 I can't go wrong.

pwnt.

Damn you, cheeky knave!

May your comeuppance be swift and brutal!

Just on this; What kind of graphics card would you need to be running for monitors that are 24 inch or larger? I'm guessing the new 8 series cards from nvidia at least...

24" or larger doesn't actually really take much of anything - desktop usage isn't really strenuous no matter what resolution you're running at - if you want to run newer games at native resolution on a 24" monitor though you'll certainly need a beast of a card.

I could hook up my old FX5200 to a giant Plasmascreen, and if I was still running it at 800*600 there would be no problems. The problemns arise when I wanna go over 1280*1024 or whatever the bigger widescreen resolution is.

It would be funny seeing my FX5200 doing that :P

Serious? My old FX5600 could run at massive resolutions...that card you had must've been really shit. :P

I actually had a 5200FX for quite a while... I loved that card :)

I never took it over 1280x1024 though, so I can't vouch for when it topped out.

Between thoes 2 I would have to choose the 1 24 inch monitor, it is bigger!

50 inch projection vs. 27 lcd monitor? i can get a deal-deal on a friend's older 50 inch dlp tv or dish out a little more for 27 hd lcd. my question is- if i hook my computer to the 50 inch will it be so fuzzy that i can't read the text/icons etc? or will i be happy and find that i have a wonderful new 50 inch monitor?

Depends how high res the projector is.
Most projectors I've seen only run at 800x600, so if you're okay with yuckily lo res for your PC use, then go Projector. But for general use and things, I'd go monitor.