The Test Bed
- 1. Introduction
- 2. The Test Bed
- 3. Color Rendering Tests
- 4. Color Rendering Tests, Continued
- 5. Latency Measures; Introducing The Test System
- 6. Working Principles
- 7. The Mechanism
- 8. The Driving Software
- 9. First Observation: Refresh Delay
- 10. Third Observation: Fade Time
- 11. What About The Standards?
- 12. Example Of Use: Viewsonic VP191b, VA + Overdrive
- 13. Overdrive, How Does It Work? Continued
- 14. Perfectionism Can Be Counterproductive
- 15. Countermanding Orders
- 16. Contrast And Uniformity
- 17. Contrast And Uniformity, Continued
- 18. The Practical Tests
- 19. Horses For Courses?
- 20. Design And Finish
- 21. Conclusion
2. The Test Bed
We decided to stick with the NVIDIA Quadro FX3000 professional graphics card for our tests. While it's not up to par for cutting edge gaming, the card's performance remains competitive and, above all, has served us well in the past.
In addition to this graphics card, all the rest of the test bed remains standard with 1 GB of RAM and a Pentium 4 CPU clocked at 3.2 GHz.
Our reference monitor, for the moment at least, is the ViewSonic VP191b. On paper, it's not the fastest but it is the most adaptable available. Not only does it excel with games, but it is also at ease with office applications and photo-editing. Video, the area which is still the accident black spot for fast monitors, is close to perfect on this one. Other monitor manufacturers may claim latencies between 3 and 4 ms but in reality, on the test bench as well as in practice, they run out of steam. And as for 2 ms of effective latency with an FPS at the cost of poorer video quality and inferior color rendering, no thanks!
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