There’s nothing more rewarding than programming on huge displays.  Say all you like about notebooks and pocket sized this and that, but if you really want to bed in and do some hardcore development, or graphics editing, or just a bit of browsing, whilst gaming, whilst listening to music, whilst watching videos, there’s nothing like masses of screen real estate.

For the past year and a half or so I’ve been enjoying two 19″ monitors (single monitor configurations feel very claustrophobic to me these days) and the experience has been “ok”.  However, finally the price points on reasonable 24″ monitors are right and I’ve invested in a little bit of an upgrade…

That’s 19″ (1280×1024) – 24″ (1920×1200) – 19″ (1280×1024).  I’ve not added the numbers together to get an accurate calculation of desktop real estate, nor have I attempted to work out how much more productive the lack of task switching and windowing has made me.  But I’ll tell you what… it’s incredibly cool.  And yes, it does take up the entire length of a dining room sized table.  And no I don’t have a problem with that.

The graphics card powering the configuration is pretty simple.  People rave about the Quadro FX cards but I went with a wholly more LO-FI setup of my current-ish generation 3d card 7900GT in PCI-E x16 mode powering the 24″ in “Single display” 3d rendering mode (for gaming), along with an old (as in, in a box somewhere) 7300GT in PCI-E 2x mode (same family, easy compatibility, same driver…) powering the two 19″ displays.  Works a treat.  Finally I found a use for the fact I needlessly bought an SLI motherboard.

I can’t begin to explain how much benefit you get from dual displays (and other people have explained it far better than I could), but the third is pure luxury.  The ability to have documentation, masses of source code and a running app a glance away is priceless.

The new display is a Benq 2400.  It’s a TN panel, so graphics “enthusiasts” will probably deride its colour reproduction (TN panels can’t quite produce the same depth of colour as other panel types), however it’s well reviewed, has decent contrast ratio and response times and no dead pixels.  Looks and feels fantastic to my heathen eyes and I’d definitely recommend it (£257 inc vat.).

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