Contrast Ratio. I've read several articles stating that many of the specs prized by the manufacturers are fake specs just to sell. Make your own decision, but this was the best article I could find on it written by a guy that is currently employed involving the testing and rating of digital televisions. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...yths_shattered

LCD response time. Back when LCD monitors were entering the affordable range, 12ms was standard and anything less than 8ms was godly. I can see how 12ms may be noticable when gaming or viewing a complex moving picture, but is it a noticable differance btwn 8ms to the <5ms ppl claim is the minimum neccesary?

NVidia VS AMD
Currently, i'm to poor to afford an upgrade, but have been trying to keep up on what is a good buy. I have seen a couple of 'user' articles and mentions of how NVidia is really trying to make a quick buck by 'upgrading' their cards when it's just a tiny upgrade from the last. Keep an eye on AMD, they appear to be surpasssing NVIdia in several areas. They even had a single GPU running 6 30inch monitors, pushing 2560x1600 each, configured as a single 7680x4800 screen playing L4D2 on DX11 and XPlane9, full res, on dx9 without a stutter. I'll repeat again, A SINGLE GPU (single processor).

Resolution. My take on resolution is: Bigger is better, but when gaming, unless it supports the supper high resolution, there's no point in getting it, and when you turn up the resolution too high in a game it may be too difficult to see your targets when you cram all those pixels into one little screen.