should a non-gamer get DVI card? (1 Viewer)

[eddieZEN]

I just got a 19" Viewsonic LCD, absolutely love it over my old 17" curved CRT especially since it pivots 90 degrees for a vertical screen!

Question: would I really see any significant improvement in picture quality if I upgrade to a DVI connection?

My applications: web browsing, MS Office, occasional Acrobat, and ZERO gaming, ZERO video editing or DVD viewing.

My current setup: 1.8GHz P-4, 512MB DDR, 120G Seagate HDD, 64MB nVidia MX420 analog video card.

My possible upgrade: a 128MB Sapphire ATI Radeon 9250, $51 shipped from newegg.com

Right now am pretty happy with the analog connection, just wonder if DVI would give me any noticeable improvement in text display and still photos viewing.

 

[WayneO]

Unless you could put two of your displays side by side with the different connections, even then I doubt you could ever tell a difference. Now, changing video card brands itself, such as you proposed, will change the image quality too. I've found ATI's to mostly have superior image quality, compared to the nVidia cards I've had in the past. Current cards are more of a toss up.

 

[Christian Behrens]

DVI isn't for gamers at all, as most LCD monitors can't compete with CRTs in terms of refresh rate. That's why a 60 Hz refresh rate is totally stable on an LC Display, while it's flickering on a CRT.

DVI gives you an absolutetly rock-solid picture quality, with no ghosting on fonts etc, therefore ideal for an office worker.

Depending on your current analog quality, the difference could be night-by-day or hardly noticeable.

What DVI offers is a pure, unchanged digital signal right from the start (the graphics card) to the end (your monitor), with no unncessary DA-AD conversion.

-Christian