Craig's Musings

I lost my patience with waiting for a sale and bought a Dell 30" Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor last weekend. It showed up this past Tuesday, and it is stunning how large it is - the resolution is 2560x1600, or 4,096,000 pixels. What is amazing is that there was not a single dead pixel. I can't believe manufacturing has gotten that precise - I remember when a dead pixel or two on a 1024x768 display (786,432 pixels) was considered "acceptable" by the manufacturers.

I got my cool display in anticipation of my new gaming PC (more in a later blog), but then when I talked to the order verification people last week I found out my new PC was going to take 30 to 45 days. No big deal, I think to myself. But then I hooked my new display to my current PC. The "obsolete" card I have (an ATI Radeon X850, which was the state of the art a year ago when I got the machine and now might as well be an ATI Mach 64 from DirectX 1 in 1995) can only display 1920x1200. The display can't do 1920x1200, it can only do 2560x1600 or 1280x800 - so my display had to scale down to 1280x800 and was running at 1/4 the resolution it could. It was looking at my Sony Vaio T series through a giant magnifying glass - underwhelming to say the least.

Rationalization set in quickly. Well, I say - my gaming machine of today is about to become my guest gaming machine of tomorrow. Surely my guests deserve to have state of the art graphics. What kind of host would I be if I invited someone over and my new gaming machine SO overshadowed the guest machine? A crappy host! And being a good host, I ordered a new ATI Radeon X1900 XTX - the single card version of the dual cards I am having put in my new machine (only they call them "Crossfire" to make you feel extra special).

I was in Seattle for a few days, and the card arrived while I was gone. I got a chance to install it about 30 minutes ago (I LOVE Dell cases - they are so easy to work with), and I only have one thing to say.

HOLY FREAKING MOLEY.

I can't go back, I won't go back. 2560x1600 is not be believed. I have an unholy amount of screen real estate. I thought my productivity went up when I had got my 24" Samsung flat panel @ 1920x1200 and my visible information jumped through the roof - this is as state changing as that. 2,304,000 pixels jumps to 4,096,000 pixels - 78% more pixels. GACK!

I haven't even tried it for gaming. I had to reinstall Windows on this machine a few weeks back (love that it is 2006 and you still have to do that) and have yet to put any of my games on. Can't wait to see how the X1900 performs (it is working with a 3.73 ghz Pentium Extreme Edition with a 1066 mhz front side bus, so hopefully it will kick some serious butt). Gotta go find out!