New PC!

[Taff64]

After waiting 5 years with my 933mhz Pentium 3, I have finally upgraded... cost a wedge though!

3.2GHZ Prescott Pentium 4
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard
512MB OCZ Dual channel DDR ram
10,000 rpm Western Digital Raptor Hard drive 36.6gig (bloody expensive!)
Plextor DVD rewriter
Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum Ex sound card

and ATI X800 XT graphics card when it comes out in few weeks!

Total just over a grand!

hope this lasts me 5 years now...

[Phil]

Nice system there mate!...

Those Raptors are damned expensive, pity your couldn't stretch the £80 or so quid extra and stick another one with it in a RAID array!. Would boost your system performance even more! (not that you need it with that little lot!).

What monitor have you got with your kit?... the new iiyama 17" TFT's are to die for, but almost impossible to get hold of at the moment.

Have fun!.

[Taff64]

Stiil got my 19'' Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 monitor at the moment. Bloody huge beast I tell ya and heavy as foook!

[blue jammer]

Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum Ex sound card << are amazing value for what you get aren't they?

I remember being in a shop and a guy was debating the differences with these and the higher end 'studio' cards that are over £1000 - main difference being the price

[Phil]

Originally Posted by Taff64

Stiil got my 19'' Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 monitor at the moment. Bloody huge beast I tell ya and heavy as foook!

Yep!, I've had the Vision Master Pro series previously. Spent ages looking for a decent black 19" iiyama, but to no avail. I'm now saving up for a 19" Iiyama TFT, (only one that boasts of a 15m/s response time). Nowhere has them in stock, and it looks like it's going to be months before they arrive..... Oh well!...

[Taff64]

Thats what put me off TFT's the response times, especially when playing games... my mate has one but when he plays games, there is a ghosting effect which doesn't look too clever...

[Phil]

Not on these Iiyama beauties!... that's why they're so hard to get hold of. Got an excellent review in Custom PC and have been sold out in the UK ever since. Dabs had a four week wait for stock last week (but this is the second time) so I cancelled my order with them... trying to aquire one direct from iiyama!.

See below for full review...


Iiyama ProLite E431S

VERDICT: Makes games look fantastic and is great in virtually every single way

When the epic book 'Rise and Fall of the 19in CRT' is eventually published, the final few pages will be quite clear about the harbinger of its doom. 'I blame the damn Iiyama ProLite E431S,' the foul-mouthed author will cry, 'that's what did for it'. For in one fell swoop, Iiyama has destroyed all the arguments people have been using against TFT monitor's for all these years.

Too expensive? Hardly - at £336, it's around the same price as a quality 19in CRT. Too dark? We think not. Like all the screens here, it's probably much brighter than your current monitor. And as for the can't-play-games argument - well, that's completely blown out of the water.

Admittedly, the ProLite isn't the first TFT to laugh in the face of games. BenQ and Hitachi's screens have been around for a few months, all boasting 16ms response times, and consequently even the fastest action is completely free of lag - you just don't even think about it. In fact, all I could think about as I mercilessly shot my way through deathmatch after deathmatch was how damn good I was at Unreal Tournament 2003 (until I realised it was on the easy difficulty setting).

But what really impressed us about the ProLite was its image quality, as games looked simply superb. If you've bought a top-end graphics card recently, you deserve a screen like this to show off its capabilities.

In fact, there was only one point when we doubted the screen's gaming ability, and that was in a particularly dark level of Acclaim Entertainment's under-rated classic Re-Volt. We couldn't see a thing in the shadows. Within milliseconds we were reaching for the OSD, praying for a gamma control - and there it was. Switching to Gamma Mode 1 was but a few short clicks away, and this solved the problem instantly, all without any need to fiddle around with the graphics card driver or game's settings.

The ProLite proved to be similarly brilliant in our everyday tests too. Whether connected via analog D-SUB cable or digital DVI, the sharp Windows desktop was a joy to behold. It was the same story in Word, when browsing the Internet and viewing photos, while our tough DisplayMate tests - which checked for colour-blending abilities and over-saturation - proved to be a formality.

So you can gather that we like this screen, but even we're willing to admit that it's not perfect. One area where a CRT is still superior, and by quite some way, is DVD playback. As with most 16ms response TFT monitors, the E431S's problem wasn't in keeping up with the action but with artefacts. Even from normal TV-viewing distance, artefacts were visible in the background.

CRTs still hold the viewing angle advantage too, as the ProLite's brightness appears to vary when you move your head away from the optimum position.

If we were going to be very harsh, we could also criticise the speakers, as it's fair to say they don't scream high-fidelity audio. But you can't expect Bang & Olufsen-like mid-range and bass from two tiny drivers built into a plastic-framed computer monitor. And at the end of the day the speakers in the E431S are bearable for background music listening if you set them at low volume.

But, to be frank, we don't care about the speakers really. What we care about is image quality, and the Iiyama ProLite E431S has this in abundance. What's more, it's an absolute bargain at £336. And if you buy it from www.pcnextday.co.uk (who proved to be the cheapest in our survey of all the leading online retailers) then it's simplicity itself to buy a 1.8m long DVI signal cable for £8.49, or a 3m cable for £10.