Midrange Buyer's Guide - September 2006

Display Selections

You have already seen our Display selections for the various system configurations, but we haven't discussed the details. There are a few reasons for this, not the least of which is that we would encourage people to buy a better display if at all possible. Many people are more than happy with a 19" LCD, but with their fixed resolutions LCDs are not quite as flexible as CRTs. If you want more pixel real estate, generally that means you need to purchase a larger LCD. Prices do begin to increase rapidly with increased display sizes, but LCD prices have also dropped quite significantly during the past year or two. Here's a brief selection of several LCDs we would recommend, and we will briefly discuss each one.

LCD Summary
19" Widescreen 16:10	Acer AL1916WAbd 19" 5ms 1440x900	$202.00
19" Standard 4:3	Acer AL1916Fbd 19" 2ms 1280x1024	$229.00
20" Standard 4:3	Acer AL2017BMD 20" 8ms 1400x1050	$253.00
20" Widescreen 16:10	BenQ FP202W 20.1" 8ms 1680x1050	$304.00
22" Widescreen 16:10	Acer AL2216Wbd 22" 5ms 1680x1050	$341.00
20.1" Standard 4:3	Samsung 204B-BK 20.1" 5ms 1600x1200 $60 Mail-in Rebate Available	$366.00

There are quite a few options at around a $200 price point. We could choose to go with a 19" standard aspect ratio LCD with an 8ms response time for slightly less than $200, or for about the same price you can upgrade to a 19" widescreen display with an advertised 5ms response time. Which is "better" is going to be based somewhat on individual opinion, but widescreen displays are becoming increasingly popular, and with video content continuing to move into the high-definition realm most of us at AnandTech prefer the format. The Acer AL1916WAbd is the first of several Acer LCDs in our list, mostly because they offer extremely competitive prices with very good overall performance and quality. BenQ, ViewSonic, Dell, Samsung, and others are reasonable alternatives if you can find them for a lower price or if you feel they have some extra feature(s) that you would like. For overall value, the Acer 19" widescreen display gets our pick.

The next step up in terms of price is a standard aspect ratio 19" LCD, again from Acer, only instead of a 5ms response time it features a 2ms response time. Some people have more issues with slow pixel response times and others, but the 2ms LCDs are among the fastest displays currently on the market and few people should notice any pixel smearing. The total amount of pixels is actually slightly more on the 19" standard aspect ratio display compared to the 19" widescreen display, and games are generally far better at supporting 1280x1024 resolution as opposed to 1440x900. Many games can now be configured to work properly with widescreen resolutions, but not everyone wants to go through the effort.

Sticking with Acer once more, we have a 20" standard aspect ratio display. For a long time, 20" LCDs had a native resolution of 1600x1200. Recently, several manufacturers have begun releasing 20" displays with a native resolution of 1400x1050. The pixel response time is up to 8ms, but for a slight increase in screen resolution some people will be willing to spend the extra $30.

Moving to 20" widescreen displays, the least expensive model we could find is the BenQ FP202W 8ms LCD. The native resolution is now 1680x1050, which means you can display 1280x1024 content without any vertical compression -- something that is not possible with the 1440x900 display. Gaming support is still going to require a bit of effort depending on the title, but after you've played some games at 1680x1050 resolution you may find it difficult to return to standard aspect ratio gaming. Last year, displays similar to this BenQ (like the Dell 2005FPW) would typically cost close to $500, although they were periodically on sale for less money. With the price now down to $300, it is becoming increasingly easy to recommend 20" widescreen displays as a great all-around solution.

Recently, however, Acer released their 22" widescreen display with the same 1680x1050 native resolution. Small increases in display sizes have often come with a price premium, but for once that is not the case. Some people might not like the slightly larger pixel size of the 22" Acer display, while those with less than stellar eyesight will likely disagree. If you like to play games but you don't have a top-end graphics configuration, the larger display size while maintaining the same resolution might also be preferable. 24" LCDs may look great, but a lot of GPUs are going to struggle to run games at the native resolution of 1920x1200, and the Acer 22" LCD strikes a nice middle ground. For this reason, it gets our upgrade recommendation.

The final option we list is a 20.1" standard aspect ratio LCD from Samsung. Compared to the 20" Acer LCD mentioned above, you get the reverse of what we just talked about with the 22" widescreen display. This time you get a higher resolution in roughly the same screen size, which means smaller pixels. Whether that's good or bad will again very by individual, but unfortunately you do have to pay more for the Samsung LCD, although there is currently a $60 mail in rebate available. Considering that similar displays cost well over $600 a year ago, the current price is very attractive, although we would still give the edge to the Acer 22" widescreen display.

The final option that we haven't bothered to list outright is to upgrade to a 23/24" display. With a price that's roughly double the cost of the Acer 22" LCD, it is anything but a cheap upgrade. Such large displays are definitely nice to use, and they have the added benefit of being able to display native 1080i/1080p video content without any stretching/squishing. They are definitely a high-end option still, and with the way display prices have been dropping today's $700 LCDs may end up costing under $300 in another year or two. At least, we can hope that will be the case. In the meantime, the 19"-22" is definitely the sweet spot in terms of price/performance. Don't be afraid to spend a bit more to increase the quality of your display however, as you will likely be staring at it far more than any other part of the computer.


Conclusion

Hopefully you have enjoyed this abbreviated look at the current midrange price segment. Since most of our readers seem to skip directly to the final component lists anyway, we thought this might be a better way of presenting our recommendations. We do understand that there's still a lot of room for variation in component selections, and by no means are these configurations the only ones we would currently recommend. Spending more or less money on any individual component is almost always justifiable depending on the intended use. A lot of people can't even dream of filling up a 250 Gigabyte hard drive, for example, but dropping to anything smaller usually results in purchasing an older model and you don't save more than $20. The motherboard, memory, and graphics card selections are all areas where there are many good alternatives that we didn't have the time to list, but we do feel confident in our recommendations and believe that the majority of users will be more than happy with the performance offered.

We'll be back with another buyer's guide in a couple weeks, and next time we will take a look at the high-end segment which we haven't specifically covered in quite a while. If you are looking for other alternatives, you can also check out our recently expanded system reviews section, where you can get someone else to do the assembly and testing for you so you can concentrate on the important stuff like actually using the computer.