?LCD Monitor?

Both NEC and Dell make pretty good moniters...

anything with 17ms response time or less, 300+ brightness and 400+ contrast ratio. Don't get the cheapest one with those spec's either.

Dell has a new 20" widescreen LCD that can be had for around $500 with the right rebates. They are sweet.

even though dell computers are crap, their PDAs and LCDs are super. 2001FP...dont know the price...it is a good monitor

An interesting Tom's Hardware article about why LCD response time ratings are basically meaningless ... http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20031105/, IMO when shopping for an LCD make shure you check out detailed reviews in magazines/online and even look at end-user comments before you buy, better still do your own comparison by doing a physical inspection in-store. Case in point - the 9860's LCD is rated at only 25ms response time but exhibits no noticeable ghosting, this said the one thing that all LCDs suffer from (regardless of response time) is tearing due to the vertical redraw rate not being able to keep up with fast moving objects in 3D games (enabling vsync in the video drivers or the game settings does help to mitigate this to some extent).

Do a search at www.bluesnews.com for LCD and sort by date. Go through the hundreds of reviews and pick.

I have dual samsung 173P monitors, which are amazing for gaming even at 25ms.

Although I'd really prefer a 17" wuxga desktop lcd. Why they don't exist i'll never know.

The 19" Sceptre X9G-Gamer LCD clocks in with a 12 ms response time and I believe can be found for under $500. I have not seen this monitor in person, but from reading the latest specs from many manufacturers, this monitor was the best reasonably priced LCD monitor I've found for gaming.

Response time is definitely an important factor when choosing a gaming monitor. Response time ratings are by no means meaningless. Yes they can be misleading depending on how the response time is rated, but do not make the mistake as writing response time off as meaningless.

Also, I own a 9860 with its 25 ms LCD. Having seen many LCD's beforehand including those of higher performance I can say safely that there is most definitely visible ghosting on the 9860's screen. And yes, I have properly configured all graphical settings, GPU settings, and am running in a proper environment. Is the ghosting horrible? No. Is it noticeable to the average user? Most likely, no. In fact, it is probably not worth bringing up as a serious issue. If you're a very competitive gamer who plays very fast paced games with high ammounts of motion, you will notice the difference. Don't get me wrong; the 9860 packs a beautiful screen, however, there is definitely ghosting occuring.

Before the 9860, I was running on a CRT 22" 1280x1024 @ 115 Hz refresh rate. That may give you an idea of what I was accustomed to before.

I had a 2001fp from dell for a few weeks and loved the heck out of it. It gets top ratings from pretty much everywhere and its pretty easy to knock the price down below $700. One thing you have watch out for with some of the super low response time monitors is that they sacrifice color depth for the sake of speed. Some of them are only 6-bits per pixel instead of 8.

If you read the Tom's Hardware article in full (accepting their data and conclusions) you'll see that response time is actually quite meaningless because it measures only the time it takes for pixels to go from absolute white to absolute black and vice versa (not taking into account any other colours in the spectrum - for which the response can be quite different) and apparently without a consistently adopted industry wide standard for how the measurement is actually calculated. Reportedly manufacturers have also been known to advertise in some cases conservative and in other cases exagerated figures based on their own calculations - thus rendering the advertised response time useless as a complete guide, granted it can still be taken as a valid indicator (assuming it's being calculated and reported with consistency) but not as an absolute measure. This asside I think far too much is made of "ghosting", although a real issue with earlier LCD displays current models exhibit little if any ghosting (perhaps noticeable to a hard core gamer used to gaming on high performance CRTs, but not obvious to the casual gamer). Horizontal tearing due to the virtical redraw rate on the other hand is a much more noticeable problem even with the best LCDs and I think the two sometimes get confused even though they're largely unrelated. Vsync does help with the tearing and video drivers that don't have vsync enabled and/or games that don't support or overide vsync will subsequently produce substantial tearing in fast paced 3D games - this is what I believe most gamers really notice and sometimes mistake for ghosting.