New for the Christmas List

Filed under Uncategorized

I just ran into an ad for Dell stuff on the Wired website.

Normally, I don’t click ads, but I like Dell widescreen lcd monitors, so I had to check it out.

Dell is now offering a 30″ Widescreen monitor! (I just wish one of their pictures put a soda can in for scale reference)

image

Its the 3007 WFP-HC, and, if it’s even remotely as good as the 2405FPW or the 2007FPW (I have one of each of these), it’s gonna be tough to resist clicking that “order now” button.

Check this blurb out from the site:

Note: For the best viewing experience, your PC must have a dual-link DVI-D graphics card that supports 2560 x 1600 resolution.

2560×1600 resolution. In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves, Whoa.

That’s a pile of pixels to be pushing around.

One of the guys I worked with asked me how I could program in white text on a black background. Put this baby on your desk, load up VS2005 and maximize it, then try staring at ~400 square inches of FFFFFF about 24″ from your face for 8+ hours a day. The 24″ Dell I have can light up my office all by itself with a full white screen. 

You could use this thing to signal aircraft.

6 Comments

  1. Ralf says:

    Whoa. Imagine three or four of those on a desktop and you’ve got… um, Swordfish?

    Does having a 16×9 aspect ratio cause the windows to be stretched horizontally? I recently played with a new wide-screen Dell system and was distressed that the icons were wider than they were tall. Was that a "feature" or just a misconfigured setting?

    Time for me to plug my favorite multi-head video card again: the nVidia Quadro NVS 440. 4-head card, PCIe, wicked fast, and passive cooling, so no fans to wear out their bearings and go rikka-rikka-rikka while you’re trying to code. Its twin GPU design presents itself to Windows as two separate cards, even though it only consumes one PCIe slot — unlike its SLI counterparts.

    Bring a heafty power supply, though… I suspect the "440" refers to the number of watts this bad boy uses.

    It’s dynamite at 2D stuff, and since we’re talking development hardware, how much 3D support do you need? I’m currently pushing 5120×1024 bits onto 4 LCD panels, and it’s wicked fast. But since it’s a standard nVidia chipset, it *does* play 3D games so long as they’re DX9 compliant, just not as sweetly as a top end $500 gamer card would.

    Did I mention standard nVidia chipset? Yep — the all-in-one driver pack from nVidia is all you need for this guy; no special drivers needed. It worked great right out of the box.

  2. Darin says:

    No, it shouldn’t stretch anything as long as you run at the native resolution of the screen.
    Apparently, though, some cards can’t necessarily run at exactly the native resolution, so you might end up with probs like that.

    However, at ~450$ for that nVidia, I can’t imagine that it can’t display at the proper native resolution.

    If I can eventually justify it, I’ll eventually get the second half of an ATI Crossfire setup (I’ve got the first half already).

    But I gotta get used to the whole 2 monitor thing first…

    Hell, with a 30" screen on my desk, I almost wonder if I go ditch the multiple monitors all together…

  3. Ralf says:

    Heh. $450? I got my card from Gateway (yes, THAT Gateway) for $299. OEM, plain brown box, but the same goodies as the shrinkwrapped retail version. (Aaaand, the first one was DOA but they swapped it out overnight for no extra charge, but billed my credit card twice, but that’s another bed-time story…)

    Oh! I could get ANOTHER one and drive a total of 8 monitors! I’ll need a toroidal desk, though…

    If you’ve already got half of the SLI duo then yeah, it probably makes sense to go ahead and get another one and RAID’em together. But dude, ATI… I still have PTSD from the last ATI card I had. The drivers, man, the drivers… I have never seen as many blue screens before or since. I changed my desktop to white letters on blue just for consistancy.

    And downloading an "update" was pure Russian roulette, with my good friends Stoli and System Restore the winners.

    It’s been a few years, and I’ve heard their drivers are better, but my right eye still twitches whenever I see the letters ATI together. *twitch*

  4. Darin says:

    Ah. Good to know. I just did a Google search for the card and grabbed one of the first few prices that came along. 299$ isn’t bad at all, just a bit more than what I gave for this ATI.

    I haven’t had any problems with the ATI card or drivers. From all the research I did, they seemed to be highly recommended. And it flat out smokes, both 2d and 3d (mine’s a multipurpose rig<g>). But if I have problems, I suspect I’ll switch to nVidia.

Post a Reply to Darin

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*