Computer monitors - 27 inch, 1440p - recommendations?

I've started thinking my monitor is "small". It's a 21.5 inch widescreen capable of 1920 x 1080 at 60 Hz, but I'm thinking I'd like a 27 inch monitor now, and that "1080p" is maybe too small for that. I do game a little but not enough to worry about response times and ghosting. Mostly I want real estate and HD movies. So I'm thinking 1440p (2,560 x 1,440). My present graphics card maxes out 2,560 x 1,600 so should manage.

Any experiences or recommendations?

I've started thinking my monitor is "small". It's a 21.5 inch widescreen capable of 1920 x 1080 at 60 Hz, but I'm thinking I'd like a 27 inch monitor now, and that "1080p" is maybe too small for that. I do game a little but not enough to worry about response times and ghosting. Mostly I want real estate and HD movies. So I'm thinking 1440p (2,560 x 1,440). My present graphics card maxes out 2,560 x 1,600 so should manage.

Any experiences or recommendations?

iMac 27 5K

iMac 27 5K

Or perhaps merely a Thunderbolt? (Why did Apple get out of the monitor business anyway?)

http://product.it168.com/0213/0022/s19427v15845

That's a helluva price premium right there tho

Quote from: old34 on January 23, 2017, 08:03:43 AM

iMac 27 5K

Or perhaps merely a Thunderbolt? (Why did Apple get out of the monitor business anyway?)

http://product.it168.com/0213/0022/s19427v15845

That's a helluva price premium right there tho

 The Fusion Drive and 3Gb hard drive and AMD Radeon R9 Graphics Display card, are more than worth the price of admission. Fusion Drive itself, is genius No tinkering necessary.

I bought a tv.  It is superior to any of the monitors I could find here in Canada and much cheaper.  The monitor I bought and immediately returned had a single pedestal which when I typed caused the monitor to wiggle from side to side.  Walking near the computer also caused the same problem. 

The tv has two legs so it doesn't wobble.  Has built in speakers and excellent picture quality.   You should check it out before buying a monitor.

A hdtv as a monitor could be okay. As far as reading around tells me, HDTVs offer 1920-by-1080 pixel resolution, which for movies and gaming on a 27" screen is probably fine. But the internet tells me 1080p on a big screen will be less than immaculately sharp for text. That's why I'm thinking 1440p, which is to say, a screen resolution of 2,560 x 1,440.

http://product.it168.com/0213/

Seems then like I'm looking at 2-3000 rmb investment. Which is more expensive than the big screen tvs I see in the supermarkets. But then, 1080p monitors at 27" might only be 1,500...

This is what I've settled on: ASUS MX27AQ.

Being as I'm buying in a shop and not online and not in a big city, price is just shy of 3000 yuan, which I was ready for so that's okay. (I'm attempting to have the school pay too.) Interesting shopping experience. Sales dude was a youngish man, late 20s, early 30s, and was willing to deploy some English. We could probably have gotten by using just his bits of English and my bits of Chinese, but he also had to hand the Baidu Fanyi app. He spoke Chinese to his phone and his phone printed out genuinely understandable English translations. (Probably let's give secret thanks to Google for the code, but it works damn well here.)

All things being equal, shall take possession this Saturday.

Well, I sure wish I'd known that wasn't going to work...

The ASUS MX27AQ is a fine monitor, but my laptop GPU being technically capable of 2560 x 1440 (WQHD) isn't working out that great. I see on the internet - one large payment too late - that people often have the question, can my laptop do WQHD over HDMI? And technically speaking they often can. And mine can. All you need is to create a custom resolution with a lower than usual refresh rate. I'm currently running 2560 x 1440 x 25Hz, and the mouse is sluggish. I could do 40Hz but the screen keeps going black for seconds at a time.

Fuzz

Currently running 2560 x 1440 x 35Hz with 32 bit colour (and everything's so tiny!), and upping the mouse responsiveness proved to be a matter of a software setting. So maaaybe this pig will actually work.

The true test: watching a movie....

Well this kinda blows...

Currently, with all appropriate drivers installed, this 1440p monitor is working like a magnified 1080p monitor with all the attendant visual nuisance that implies, in particular the slight but obvious blurriness. Worse, last night I somehow managed to access higher resolutions that were properly functional - and now they're gone....

I think those properly functional extra modes appeared because I was screwing around with Custom Resolution Utility, but now that they've disappeared they seem resolute in not being recalled. No amount of CRU jiggery-pokery nor driver replacement seems to work.

I don't know exactly what's going wrong. (1) My laptop GPU is technically capable of up to 2560 x 1600 x I-don't-know-what refresh rate, so making it run a 2560 x 1440 monitor is a stretch. (2) Unless you can patch the driver, connecting this laptop to that monitor by a single HDMI cable seems apparently to impose a 165 MHz frequency limit on what can pass through (and therefore an upper limit of resolution x refresh rate) (which actually should mean 2560 x 1440 x 44, shouldn't it?)

Anyway, some hardware constraint's making it not work in the way I dreamed it would. Let this be a lesson to you all, kids. Don't reach for the sun on a ladder of straw.

Currently sitting on 2176 x 1224 x 59Hz, which mode was created Intel Graphics Media and Control Panel (yes, intel - the GPU is AMD Radeon and it works beside in-friggen-tel onboard graphics, though I wish it wouldn't.... don't buy switchable graphics, kids; and don't buy laptops just because you think a desktop "ties you down, man"). I can get 2560 x 1440 x 44 too, but it plays movies with just a little too much stutter.... All up, despite using AMD/ATI Pixel Clock Patcher, the pixel clock doesn't seem patched. I'm stuck with whatever mode x refresh rate comes in at less than 165 MHz. There may be some hardware limit in the card (probably), or the HDMI cable is less than perfect (probably not), or the Patcher didn't actually patch even though it says it did. PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFt.

Don't skimp on ALL the hardware, kids. Halfway hardware will make you cry.

Overall, the MX27AQ strikes me as a good monitor. Underall, I'm not real sure I needed it. But I...

cleared out all the video drivers; installed latest
created custom resolutions; the GPU will be all it can be.
use 2560 x 1440 x 44p every day now; and tweaked the mouse to suit
got my various media players doing more hardware decoding; they will stutter no more

and shazaam, monitor is werkin, son.


Presently negotiating with the school to have them consider this a piece of hardware they bought for me under the terms of my contract. Their present offer is 3 mao on the yuan (aka 1000 yuan all told) provided I cough up an official fapiao (which I do have).