Dell U2412M - 16:10 IPS without Breaking the Bank

For every monitor review that I’ve done for AnandTech so far, I know that as soon as I check the comments there will be a thread with the same theme: “I don’t care about 1080p monitors, I only want 16:10 aspect ratios!” When widescreen displays first came out for desktop LCD monitors, virtually every model was a 16:10 display. The 20” Dell I have on my own desk is 16:10, and almost every vendor made 16:10 panels.

As the price of flat panels dropped and HDTV adoption took over, more and more desktop panels migrated to the HDTV aspect ratio of 16:9. The reasons behind this were easy to understand, as you could produce more displays, reuse panels across PC and TV lines, and have a lower cost across the board to let you sell them for less. Most people were more than happy to pay less for a display than to pay 2-3 times as much for those extra 120 pixels at the bottom of a display. As this happened, 16:10 panels became relegated to higher end models, almost always as IPS panels and often with high end features like AdobeRGB colorspace support and more.

Dell finally decided to address this with their U2412M display that features a 1920x1200 on its 24” panel. The U2412M is also an eIPS panel that is natively 6-bit but uses A-FRC to display 16.7 million colors. Dell has managed to bring this monitor in at $329 and can often be found on sale for under $300, while most other 16:10 24” panels come in at $500 or more. What did Dell have to do to hit this aggressive price point? We put the Dell through its paces to find out.

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Boosting your APU graphics memory without breaking the bank

The AMD Llano APUs have been around for a short while now and have made a fair old impact with their discrete-level integrated graphics capabilities. You’re basically getting similar graphics performance in video games from an integrated part, as you’d expect from adding a genuine graphics cards. Many of you will have noticed however that in this scenario, the PCs RAM can almost become a bottleneck or sorts. A discrete graphics card will typically come with a healthy, 256MB, 512MB or 1GB of GDDR memory, memory that’s designed specially for graphics subsystems, and while today’s PCs are content with DDR3 memory, these graphics cards are usually built using faster GDDR5 chips which are designed for speedy data transfer, the likes of which a GPU really thrives on.

It is for these reasons that many PC builders using an AMD Llano APU are opting to use higher clocked DDR3 memory than one would traditionally choose. Most PC builds would have no problems using regular everyday 1333 data rate memory DIMMs, but tests have shown that these new APUs in fact really benefit from a little extra memory headroom; from say 1600 or 1866 data rate RAM.

Tom’s Hardware has put together an interesting article that examines and compares some faster clocked RAM offerings and the effects that is can have on graphics performance with an APU. Its really interesting to see that a 3D gaming performance boost from memory alone might not actually cost as much as you expected. Furthermore, I’d expect to see faster clocked RAM sets come down in price in the coming months, as memory vendors tempt you to enjoy a boost in just the right place.

Read the article in full here on Tom’s Hardware here.

You can learn more about AMD APUs and the GIGABYTE boards that drive them here.

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