Apr 16, 2008 01:15 PM
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A few days back, I decided to get myself a 19" LCD monitor and upgrade my pc. I've had my assembled PC for the past 4 years and finally decided to go for a bigger screen. So, I go to the local computer market and sought for the best LCD available at a reasonable rate. Reasonable meaning Rupees 10k or less. I headed over to my favorite store and met the salesperson I visit all the time. My research landed me with two options Acer and ViewSonic. I asked him to show me both the model (19") side by side and so he did.
I liked the Acer monitor at first but then he said something about more better resolution, Super HD and a 22" resolution, all this in a 19" monitor. And the ViewSonic had these options with one of the 19" Wide models. I asked him to get me that and fell for it at first sight. I purchased this LCD for 10, 300 and it looked very promising indeed. It had a DVI input too! I happily carried it home, plugged it to the PC using the normal video cable (no DVI support VGA card in the system available) and turned it on. The graphics looked awful at first obviously because the resolution was not set properly. I worked on it till like 3AM on a Saturday night trying to fix the resolution but just could not. I had a 4 year old PC with an INtel 845Motherboard with onboard 64MB max graphics, with no PCI Express slots and no PCI Graphics card installed.
A quick chat with ViewSonic help online also suggested to check the Video card in the machine. Bummer, with Sunday coming in I was in for a really bad weekend with all hopes of using the new LCD going down the drain. Sunday arrived, I jumped out of bed, had a quick chat with my techie bro online and asked him what sort of PCI Graphic cards are available, I head to the computer market and thanks to some shops that keep open on Sunday and started looking for PCI Graphics cards. I inquired about 4-5 shops and none had PCI Graphics cards, only PCI Express cards. I needed to get that 1680x1050 resolution at any cost.
I went to this Shweta computers shop at CTC, Hyderabad and found out that PCI Graphics are outdated and would cost a bomb in todays market. Also, for that price I figured I can get a motherboard too. I started inquiring about that too and found a NVidia motherboard with built in 256MB video memory and an AGP slot too for expanding further. I had to get this as it was cheaper than getting a motherboard and a pci express card separately. Almost 30-40% price difference. I went for the xfx 630i 7100 GeForce motherboard with 2GB RAM 633MHz, a 160GB hard drive (Sata) and a 2.2 GHz core 2 Duo Processor. It did set me back by Rupees 13k but I had to upgrade from my 845 64MB video memory machine and that day had arrived. I couldn't wait to get home and install the new monitor.
I installed the DVI plug turned the machine on, installed the new windows OS and viola, the resolution was automatically taken to 1680x1050 without even the monitor drivers being installed. This had to be done by the graphics adapter for sure. And now I cant stop browsing the net on this awesome display. It looks so flawless. Such a big workspace too on the desktop and colors are simply vibrant.
