rec.autos.simulators

Your computer doesn't know or care what size your monitor is.  A larger CRT
draws more AC power from the power company, not your computer.

More likely, when you get your 17" monitor, you will WANT to use higher
refresh rates, higher color and spatial resolutions simply because you can now
see the difference.  The higher rates and resolutions DO put more demand on
the video card, and indirectly the CPU (more pixels and colors to process.  

Hope this helps,

I'm looking to buy a new PC soon and am looking at a 17" monitor but if
it comes with a performance hit then I probably stick with the 15".

Anybody have any experience and/or knowledge about this?

Thanks,

Stuart J. Boyle

This is absolutely FALSE (and more than a little bit amusing).

A 14" monitor running at 640x480 has no more processor load than a 20"
monitor running at 640x480.

Try this. Run 3dbench with your monitor plugged in. Now unplug your
monitor and run it again. Your results will be the same. I promise.
Really. I'd wager my next paycheck on it. But since netnews isn't
binding, if by some freak of nature your results ARE different (everyone
finds a loophole, buncha mercenaries), you won't get a dime, so I'm
fairly safe from any sort of litigation or collection.

Ok, moment of levity done with, I move on.

What the larger monitors will (usually) do is allow you to run programs
(usually things that rely heavily on higher resolutions, like image
viewers, user interfaces, or CAD stuff) at higher resolutions that WILL
take more power to run. Not always because of the processor,
specifically, but simply because the amount of information needed to
update a higher resolution image is greater.

640 x 480 x 8 < 800 x 600 x 16 < 1024 x 768 x 24

For each setting, the space needed to hold a single display screen can be
calculated by multiplying the X axis by the Y axis by the color depth
(256 colors is 8 bit, 16.7 million colors is 24 bit, with a couple of
varieties in between, and 32 bit color, which I don't really see the
point of, but I'm sure someone will be sure to point out to me) (hint,
hint), and then dividing by 8 (8 bits to a byte).

Follow that through the run-on sidebars? Here, let's try an example.

640 x 480 x 8    (640x480 at 256 colors, or 8-bit color)
-------------                                =   307,200
      8          (divide by 8 to get bytes)

1024 x 768 x 8   (1024x768 at 256 colors)
--------------                               =   786,432
      8          (divide by 8 to get bytes)

So without increasing the color depth, and only bumping the resolution up
by two standard notches (something even many 14" monitors can do) we have
increased the amount of data needed to update the screen more than twofold.

Increasing the resolution further or increasing the color depth makes the
difference even bigger.

Now I'm sure someone will come in and point out some fundamental error in
all this, or even be ***enough to point out that for 8 bit color all
you need to do is Vert x Horiz, but hey, that's what you get for trying
to be helpful and all that.

 -LjM

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