It's so... functional... yeah... that's it.

I decided to spring for a new monitor. I’ve been really waiting for the price of a 16:9 display to be “affordable” and Gateway has come to the rescue. I was a little cautious of buying a Gateway branded monitor, but I have to tell you that I’m extremely happy with it after a few days of using it.

I really didn’t know how well having a 16:9 display could help out working within Visual Studio. That extra space sure makes it easier to have the coding area visible with plenty of viewing area and still have the tool windows up for easy and instant access.

Want to view a lot of lines of code at one time? Just tilt the monitor. (OK, this is more of a novelty and one that that I don’t think I’ll really use that much… but hey… I can and that’s good enough.)

Yeah, yeah, yeah… so it’s great for software development. What about performance? Before I get to that, let me tell you about how the screen looks. It looks great… has a deep tone to it that just makes the desktop really stand out. With the Windows XP Media Center “skin”, it looks incredibly nice. Now on to performance…

World of Warcraft works great in 16:9. Seeing what mounts to nearly another 50% view horizontally really helps to draw you into the world even more.

Half-Life 2… looks incredible in 16:9.

So if your looking for a monitor with a lot of bang for the buck, be sure to take a look at this one.