Greetings folks, today Ill be sharing my thoughts on getting a budget Surround gaming setup up and running. Recently, I put together a Surround gaming rig for a buddy of mine with 3 19in Dell 1907FPC monitors. He didn't want to invest much into it since he wasn't quite sure if he was going to use it as much as he would like. So we went off and cruised craigslist and ebay when we stumbled onto these:
 
http://www.ebay.com/itm/2...ksid=p3984.m1423.l2649
 
So I made an offer of $30 per monitor for 3 of them. With shipping the total was $143 and change. Not bad at all for 3 19in monitors with DVI inputs and small bezels. The benefit is not only the price of entry was significantly lowered but so were the VRAM demands from a multi-monitor setup. Being that they are only 1280x1024 screens that is a total of 3840x1024 in surround (4080x1024 with bezel correction) it would really alleviate him running into VRAM issues with his GTX480's that have 1.5GB VRAM.
 
Anyway to make a long story short, when he got the monitors I was so impressed that I went and picked up 3 of the same myself. And the seller again accepted an offer of $30 per monitor, so it was the same $143 my buddy paid. Now some of you are probably wondering, didn't I have Surround already up and running with much higher resolution screens? Well, yes I did, 1st I had 3 2560x1600 displays but we won't talk about what happened to them ) then I had 3  ACER 1920x1080 displays. (they are now sold and or traded) and I'm now on these 1280x1024 Dell monitors. And to be honest I like these better. To me at least it seems the images are far less distorted on the peripheral displays (thanks to the 4:3 aspect ratios) and the games feel a LOT smoother (no doubt a benefit of the lower resolution and the fact that these monitors do 75Hz at their native resolution). And I haven't lost much desktop real estate for web browsing or general usage thanks to the 1024 vertical resolution.
 
Anyway enough babble, here are the pics of them setup on my desk:
 

 
BF3

 
Crysis 2

 
Diablo 3

 
Max Payne 3

 
All the above games are maxed settings being played on my 2 GTX580 1.5GB cards.

Nice!!!

Afterburner


Nice!!!

And cheap For less than what I sold one of my Acer monitors for, I got 3 of these!

I always said the higher the hz on a monitor the better it looks!
That is smart thinking if you ask me, specially when you can get Dell monitors for that cheap!
Great screen shots and thanks for sharing

thanks for sharing crap.

That would actually be a great way for many to step into surround. Good to see you posting too.

Surround has always been about aspect ratio, not pixel count. Many people simply try to go for the largest displays they can get -- which often can over-whelm your whole desk. I'm all for small LCD setups. There are advantages to it. Triple 5:4 LCD = less aspect ratio distortion on side displays. Triple 1280x1024 means less pixel count -- directly translating into much improved FPS. In my projection setups, I specifically prefer 1280x800 projectors over 1920x1080 for those reason and a few others.

This is what I do for my business. You really do not need 1920x1080 x3 in surround. I find anything 1440 and up to be perfect.
 
And I love the size of the 23" for my desk, others are happy with 20". 
 
Totally agree with Brad on this one. Not about pixels, all about the aspect ratio...
 
However... When not going for the cheap, weeeeeeeeell... 

Wow thats actually pretty sick, I wish I still had my 2 460's to I could pick up a set and run three monitors. Now I only have on 580 so that option is out of the window . This year my school got a bunch of wide screen 19 or 20in monitors for all of the teachers computers and all I ever do is sit around in class and think about playing bf3 on three of those screens lol

Nice work Crap!
 
I tend to think the sweet spot for me is 19x10, but I know others prefer smaller.  Maybe we can get more inductees into the Surround Club with info like this.  Well done.

Damn, the listing is over. I was going to get 3 or 4.