Hardware: Monitors/Video Cards

When choosing a monitor for online poker, you will want to consider three things -

1. Your budget - If you are playing nickel dime poker and simply tired of looking at a 4 year old monitor, but don't have much money to spend, then a less expensive monitor is fine, and often cheaper is better so that you can upgrade later without having wasted hundreds of dollars on a monitor that is no longer any use to you.

2. Multi-tabling - Many sites these days (Poker Stars and Party Poker are good examples) allow you to resize the tables you are playing on, making the resolution of your monitor less important. You can easily multi-table on these sites with a good quality 19" monitor with 1280x1024 resolution. With other sites (Bodog is a good example) the tables always display at around 800x600, and can not be resized. If you are playing on those sites, or think you may be playing on many different sites in the future, then a 1600x1200 resolution will allow you to play four tables with no overlap.

Overlapping tables seems okay when you start doing it, but once you have played with no overlap you'll wonder how you ever survived with all your tables laying all over each other and a big mess on your screen. Very few monitors these days allow 1600x1200 native resolution, but there are still some good deals out there. You will also need to make sure your video card can handle 1600x1200 native resolution, and a cheap video card that will allow multiple monitors at high resolution is listed below. 

3. One monitor or two? - Theoretically you can use as many monitors as your budget permits with a deskstand like one of these.

Moview MV2XDC Double Monitor Arm

Atdec Quad Mount Stand

Two monitors will make most people quite happy and if both monitors are nice 1600x1200 LCD's, your eyes will thank you and your friends will be heartily impressed to see the size of your virtual desktop.

Some recommendations:

If you are going with 1600x1200 resolution wanting faster preformance or using multiple monitors an inexpensive video card may be necessary. Spending $200 or more on a video card is really pointless if your system isn't used for a lot of expensive video games, and the $35 video card below works quite well for multiple monitors and 1600x1200 resolution.

For a better option and faster response times from multiple high resolution monitors, this video card will keep you happy for a long time without breaking the bank -

A solid and good looking monitor that doesn't cost a lot of money can be found here. This also works as a good second monitor for other things while you play poker on your 1280x1024 resolution display.

Acer AL1916CB 19 LCD Monitor

For a nice 20" monitor that will handle 1600x1200 resolution for multi-tabling, this is as good a deal as we have ever seen.

Planar PL2011M 20 LCD Monitor

If you are looking for a huge monitor with beautiful picture quality this is the one Fox has been eyeing lately.

Samsung 275T 27 LCD Monitor