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My wife is talking to me about replacing a 24" monitor with a 27" or 30" for Christmas. Have pretty much settled on a Dell U2711 or U3011.

BUT

There is some amount of gaming that I'm doing and I'm thinking 2560x 1440/1600 is probably too many pixels to push even with a Radeon 6950.

So I'm wondering if either of them do a decent job of getting a 1900x1060/1200 signal and looking proper or if by not running at native they have some issues.

Any insight appreciated.

Edit: fix typo

You can choose to have your video card do the scaling rather than the monitor if you want to.
Either way, I've never had a problem with running games at a lower-than-native resolution on the Dell 20" or 24". Make sure you do the proper scaled resolution though if you go that route (ie don't do 16:9 resolutions on a 16:10 native).

Games look okay on these monitors at different resolutions. It's not ideal, but Dell has generally done a good job with the scalers in their UltraSharp monitor line. A 2560x1600 monitor can provide an amazing gaming experience. Most of my games run fine at 2560x1600 with a single Radeon HD6970.

Upgrading to a 4-megapixel monitor may give you a reason to want to also upgrade to a next-generation graphics card fabricated at 28nm in the next six months.

I have a U3011 and I gamed on an shader unlocked 2GB 6950 for a while. It was adequate for most games at 25x16 on medium-high settings. 2 of those puppies are enough for Ultra settings in most games.

For the most part, I can run games at good settings on my u2711 at 2560x1440 with a single 6950. I just need to avoid the more computationally expensive stuff and run low/no AA. Once the profile is out I can use crossfire and push my settings higher.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Games look okay on these monitors at different resolutions. It's not ideal, but Dell has generally done a good job with the scalers in their UltraSharp monitor line.

Does running the game at a lower resolution and relying on the scaler add much output latency on those monitors?

Thanks all. Went ahead and got the U3011 and it arrived today. Looks sharp.

Screwed up and didn't notice my graphics card required a mini DisplayPort cable... whoops. So running it off of 2x DVI right now. But all things are running well. Thanks again for the help.

You mean that you're running your 2560x1600 monitor off one dual-link DVI-D connection, correct? Dual-link just means that there are more pins and more bandwidth in the connection, not that you use two cables.

Sorry for the confusion. Yes 1 Dual link cable with the extra pins although I did hook up the other channel in my ignorance before I figured it out.

Although I do have another question -- is there any benefit to moving to display port? I'm guessing no but I don't know.

Fearless wrote:

Although I do have another question -- is there any benefit to moving to display port? I'm guessing no but I don't know.

Most of the advantages are in the technical details. For typical usage scenarios it won't make a difference whether you use DVI or DisplayPort. If your video card and monitor both support DisplayPort natively, go ahead and use it. Otherwise, don't worry about it.

DisplayPort (like HDMI) allows audio to be carried over the video cable, which may be useful for multimedia (HTPC) type applications. It also tends to be used on video cards that support large numbers of displays (e.g. the 6-head cards from ATI), since the smaller connector size makes it possible to cram more of them onto the bracket.