Ask HN: What is your monitor setup?

I'm in the market for a new monitor. My setup is both for gaming and working and I'm using a gigabyte 27" 1440p/144hz monitor and an old dell 23" monitor. While refresh rate is great on the gigabyte monitor it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of picture quality. The old DELL looks even better than the newish gigabyte monitor.

I wonder what everyone else is using these days ? I can take some inspirations from your posts.

I have 32" GIGABYTE M32U that I bought for christmas of 2021 and It's been great. I see it is still on US Amazon for $400. It's not the best but I cannot say I had any issues or miss any features. I paid 850€ which was a lot but specs-wise, anything close was well above 1000€. So it was a clear winner.

Basically, I would say that don't chase max specs, you will likely use only half of the capabilities anyway. Decide what are your deal-breakers and just find the cheapest match.

PS: I went to 32" from 24". I was concerned with the size but I think I would be able to use up to 38". It depends on your desk setup and how far the screen is from your face. I cannot touch my screen with my hand, it's too far. So larger screen works for me. But above 38", I would definitely have to use my eyes more and maybe even move my head so see the corners, which is a clear indicator of oversized screen.

2 months agoby gethly

Dual 24" monitors (decent quality IPS), one uses an HDMI KVM to switch between different/retro systems, Recently upgraded from VGA to HDMI switchbox, the difference was worth the cost to buy some [X] to HDMI adapters. Now there's enough inexpensive ones to cover all the bases.

The benefit for me is I use the main system to look things up and then switch to the target system and I have the main display as a reference and the other as well,

Used to have the side monitor as the KVM one, but find I work better with the switched monitor the one in the center, as a side display I would get sore/tired neck from always looking to the side. With it center I am more comfortable to concentrate on the task at hand on the other system I have up.

2 months agoby LarryMade2

A single 27" 4K monitor at home, along with my 14" MacBook Pro screen.

A single 32" 4K OLED monitor at work, along with my 16" MacBook Pro screen. Formerly, it was 3 x 27" 4K and 1440p monitors, but I wanted to focus more and it was jacking up my neck.

I have to monitor number of different things throughout the day at work, but I moved to a model of better automated monitoring and alerting to free up the brain and lessen context switches.

2 months agoby runjake

Single AOC 27" UHD monitor on my desktop Windows system at home. I use multiple desktops for context switching. No gaming, just a bit of dev and photo stuff.

At work, a couple of Dell 27" UHD monitors attached to my Windows laptop via DP ports on a dock. Single desktop as I have plenty of screen space. I mostly live in Visual Studio and Outlook/Teams.

No complaints about either - all works pretty well.

2 months agoby andyjohnson0

I use 43" Dell Ultrasharp, it comes with built-in kvm for switching between signal sources so I can connect both my macbook and linux laptop. There is only one tiny but very annoying problem with this setup, macbook will cause screen to restart randomly, sometimes it will make cracking noise... if this was not happening I would say it's almost perfect.

2 months agoby thrw888

I find one 4K is good. I wouldn't bother with anything not 4K these days.

I was reminiscing about how much dual monitors used to be a pretty standard thing, and definitely pretty helpful when economical monitors maxed out at 1920x1080, but seems much less prevalent these days. Not too surprising I guess considering the costs, space consumption, hardware, cables, etc etc.

2 months agoby tacostakohashi

I would love to test a 16" MBP to see if this kills the need for an external display.

Couldn't adapt to wide or bigger tvs, on my short lived tests..

2 months agoby swah

34" WQHD in the middle, laptop on the right, on the left a normal 27inch 16:9 screen in portraits mode to read lots of text (emails, git, logs, websites with text etc.)

Ultra wide screen 49" like Samsung G9 is nice too but it's very heavy and expensive, it's not that much trouble to actually have multiple screens instead

2 months agoby ttoinou

27" 4K monitor (163 ppi, not amazing but decent), 60Hz refresh rate so it's not for gaming or anything. Screen to the left is my MacBook Pro with a 16".

Then I have another monitor behind (connected to another computer) in landscape mode showing some dashboards etc, but it's off at the moment.

2 months agoby sgt

I have 2 LG DualUps. Though one is probably more than enough.

https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor

2 months agoby ryanchants

Two 28" Samsung 4K monitors from Costco from ~6 years ago.

I like having two, because you can dock/organize windows more cleanly than with one giant monitor.

2 months agoby jasonthorsness

You can only look at one thing at a time so its a single 34 ultrawide

Multi tasking seems worse on sequoia… i cant fully articulate it yet