The AOC Monitor is truly a beautiful thing to behold with a wonderful range of 20,000 to 1 ratio and a 2 M.S. response time the graphics are simply out of this world. While running the test on the new system I had the luck to have and run this monitor in extended desktop alongside a Acer 22 inch which in my humble opinion falls sadly short.

The AOC Monitor in games such as counter strike, Guild wars, Dungeon Runners and many others truly is able to utilize your video card's performance. It's important to note that with any system that the graphics and how they appear really depend on a few factors those being the Quality of the Video Card your using, the overall speed of your system and lastly but not least the Monitor.

Moderately priced it is by far one of the things I do not understand of why someone would purchase a ordinary monitor when for the same money or perhaps just a little more you can own a piece of art!

Boasting a 20,000 to 1 Ratio (dynamic) resolution and standard with a 2ms (typ) this model clearly sets the bar for the future of Monitor's. Speaking honestly almost anyone can crank out a monitor with a 8000 to 1 ratio blah blah blah, But with a 20,000 to 1 ratio it enables the end user to be able to fully enjoy enhanced game graphics, DVD Movies and Blue Ray to its fullest Extent!

I would post images and screen shots for you to see the difference but it would still be seen through a sub standard Monitor and to fully appreciate this companies products you must see them to truly stand in awe.

Below are some of the stat's of the monitor itself.

Cabinet Color Piano Black Finish

Panel TFT Active Matrix LCD

22" Widescreen, Diagonal

558.7mm Viewable Image Size

Bright Glossy Panel

Pixel Pitch 0.282mm x 0.282mm

Display Area 474mm x 296mm

Brightness 300 cd/m2 (typ)

Contrast Ratio 20,000:1 (dynamic)

Response Time 2ms (typ)

Viewing Angle Horizontal: 170 Degrees (CR>10)

Vertical: 160 Degrees (CR>10)

Compatibility PC/Windows, Mac® Equipped With Analog VGA Dsub or DVI Port

Scanning Frequency Horizontal: 30K~83KHz

Vertical: 56~75 Hz

Pixel Frequency 165MHz

Maximum Resolution

Recommended Resolution

1680x1050x60Hz

1680x1050@60Hz

Supported Resolutions 640x480@56/60/67/72/75Hz, 720x400@70Hz, 832x624@75Hz

800x600@56/60/72/75Hz, 1024x768@60/70/75Hz

1152x864@75Hz, 1440x900@60Hz, 1280x960@60Hz

1680x1050@60Hz

Color 16.7M

Signal Input Analog: 0.7Vp-p(standard), 75 OHM, Positive

Digital Input DVI-D & HDMI with HDCP*

Connectors Analog RGB Signal: 15-pin D-sub Male

Digital Signal: 24-pin DVI-D

Power: (3-Pin Plug CEE22)

Power Source Universal 100~240VAC, 50/60Hz

Power Consumption 49Watts ( Max. )

Plug & Play DDC/2B, DDC/CI

EPA ENERGY STAR® Yes

User Control Navigation Key (Auto, Eco/Up, Down, Menu), Power

OSD Languages 8 Languages including English, French and Spanish

Regulations cULus, FCC, CE, Certified for Windows Vista Logo, ROHS

Built-in Speakers 2W x 2

Other Features

720p/1080i HD Compatible, Aluminum Navigation Key, User Friendly

Graphical OSD Menu, VESA 100mm Wall Mount Compliant**,

Kensington Security Slot, includes AOC proprietary

i-Menu software OSD

Dimensions (WxHxD mm) Monitor: 510x417x220, Carton: 562x454x132

Dimensions (WxHxD inches) Monitor: 20.1x16.4x8.7, Carton: 22.1x17.9x5.2

Weight 11.4 lbs (5.2 kgs) Net

14.7 lbs (6.7 kgs) Gross

To see and experience one of these Super Hot Monitors, check out http://www.aoc.com for where you can purchase them.

Wolfie of Blade Radio

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Warhammer Online:Age of Reckoning

So, many of you gamers out there in gaming land are always on the lookout for new exciting games to wet your appetite for destruction chaos and bloodshed. Well, good news. Mythic has recently teamed with EA to bring a new mmo to your hard drive, Warhammer Online:Age of Reckoning. After getting some good quality time with this game I have a lot to say about it, and I hope I’m not to opinionated for anyone.

Now lets get into the first question, “Drew, what IS Warhammer anyways?” Well, Warhammer is a very large thing with many avenues to look at. Warhammer from a gamers perspective may first conjure up an RTS with many races, planets, buildings, and platoons to control. Dawn of War was the name of the game, but that was set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, so try to let your mind go away from that for a second. Warhammer Fantasy battles originated as a strategy board game. Think Risk meets pen and paper role playing. Now, Warhammer Fantasy Battles had lots of story behind each race, lots of lore within its world. There was big maps, campaigns, and all sorts of ways to play the game. From small treasure band games to giant war fronts with two opposing full armies, many avenues lay in wait. Well, with all the lore development and all the playing and open-ness of the game, people started writing out individual characters, leaders, and stories set within Warhammer. Short stories in magazines grew into full novels that now are very high in number. This leaves a lot of wiggle room.

The online game plays into the room offered up within the canon. The Age of Reckoning is a time period taken both from Warhammer lore and taken away from it. The lore, the canon, and story structure is all there, but told at a separate time period then the books are told from so that things can work in a games favor. Now I’m a Warhammer fan and I was skeptical on this, but hear me out. The game has a wonderfully brilliant story, and everything is kept well enough intact from what I can tell. Everything you do seems to be for purpose.

This is where I get to get into the meat and potatoes of the game. Some of you may be familiar with games like World of Warcraft or Everquest, where questing is largely just to get you to the max level get you some items and then get you onto the next area. In Warhammer things are much more continuous. From my time in World of Warcraft I got a lot of this style of quest, “This person is in trouble, go help them” “MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE SAVE ME” then you proceed to put the house out “Thank you, here’s a reward”. While that works for some people, I don’t buy into it. I like to feel like I really help for something other then random housewife A in the woods. Lets take the same STYLE of quest and put it into a much deeper context. “Hello, Go find the Dwarven worker who mans Helga.” “Hi, I man Helga. Helga is a Giant Dwarven war cannon that helps us kill Greenskins in our war efforts could you please help us kill them by making a cannon ball?" You can then make the cannon ball and see it launch out into the horizon. Later on during a public quest you are stopping a tribe of Greenskins from getting any closer to the Dwarven camp. In the last part of the quest npcs are calling out for Helga, which you can look and see from your vantage point is shooting cannon balls to the quest. Now obviously its going to keep shooting cannon balls at the PQ no matter if there is people doing the cannon ball quest, but think of it this way, you can always know that “You helped the War effort”

And that goes into another gameplay element, public quests. Public quests kind of play out like this. You walk into an area and our told the goals to the quest at hand. You then can choose to help in the quest, or go on about your way. There are three tiers to public quests, and the more you do towards each tier’s goals, the more points your awarded. Get the number 1 spot in points you get +400. Now this is going to get confusing, so try and stay with me. Spot 1 is 400 and it goes down and the first 6 spots get extra points, right? Then there is a roll, and numbers between 1 and 1,000 are rolled (a d1000? I don’t know if they exist, if they do GET ME ONE please J ). Your roll and your extra points are added together to form the final ranking, this final ranking will let you get into the chest that spawns, the top 3 get to loot the chest before the PQ starts all over again. It is like a mini-raid or farm. You don’t have to pre-plan a party cause normally there are going to be others doing that public quest at any time, you can jump in, take part, and jump out whenever you want. Those are very fun and exciting way of easily getting loot and experience and money without a lot of hassle.

Then you have the games back bone, what this game was made around and is best at, RvR. Some people may remember RvR from the game “The Dark Ages of Camelot”, but I will explain it for people who do not. The game is set into tiers of story, and each tier has an area that has two Warcamps and a battlefield between. These battlefields are open ended, and have keeps in each. The keeps have a few walls that must be sieged, but if you are part of the group that captures the keep, you get into a chest with loot for everyone, and any guild there can claim the keep as there’s.

RvR has many tactics that lie within it. The defending party of course can go into the castle and take the high ground, attacking from the keeps towers and such. The offensive team has certain areas where you can build trebuchets, ballistae, and many other things to help try to break the keeps doors down so your people can get in. Then inside you have stairs to navigate, making for interesting standoffs as you try to balance keeping your line strong with tanks moving up and keeping enough damage going on. The keep lord is your target when you get through the castle defenses, he is a high level for the tier and has 4 high level body guards with him that are no push overs. All this takes place in an open world, so at any time a group can come in and help whoever is trying to defend or capture. This all, again, goes into the war effort.

The open world battlefield idea is also a grand one. Some of what I have seen in beta has been triple digit players on the RvR battlefield, and each kill gains you points, again, towards the war effort. The better your war effort, the more land you control, the more you can do within the world. War is everywhere, and effects everything. This makes the game very VERY dynamic.

Game play is wonderful, but you would be playing with characters. Each avatar is created through pre-selected models for different parts of the body. But with a lot of variables in face, eyes, skin color, and race specific items (dwarves have different beards and jewelry, the goblin shaman has ears and teeth that are variable) the starting out has a lot of room. Then when you get into all the different armor choices, the doppelganger syndrome doesn’t seem to creep its ugly head. Each profession in this game is taken out and put into what every online RPG fan knows since the days of 3 classes in Diablo. You have the tank, the melee berserker or damage per second (dps) class, the ranged dps class, and the healers class. Warhammer does some interesting things again with these classes.

Lets take the ironbreaker for instance. An ironbreaker in Warhammer lore is a Dwarven warrior who is heavily armored and stands there ground fighting in tunnels. This translates very well to the tank class. As the ironbreaker fights, he builds up grudges, and these grudges are linked to skills, the more you have the better the skills work. These go into buffs for you and your party and debuffs for the enemies. Putting emphasis on fighting in this case makes it very strategic for an ironbreaker, using a skill that wastes your grudges to soon may waste in on a small mob, but using it to late might make it a complete waste, or possibly trying to save it for the next mob you may lose it due to degeneration of it. Similair systems are used in different archetypes to a much different effect. The Disciple of Khaine for instance, a worshipper of the elven god of War and murder, fuel a meter with their enemies “Soul Essence” which can power healing skills. This requires even the healer to fight to gain strength to heal. The Warrior Priest has the same idea with different buffs, debuffs, and attacks that fuel his skills in different areas. This makes sure that even the healers of the game can be strategically used in fighting scenarios. Other games have used healers and given them some damaging, but never balanced there damaging into a more group oriented role. The damage combined with the buffs make even the healer archetypes exciting classes to watch on the battlefield, and a great class to play.

Now, back to what does it mean for YOU the consumer. Some of you play Guild Wars because of the hatred of “subscription fees” and I understand that, as I hate them as well. Now, playing this beta in its open world I like the persistent world dynamic now more then ever because of the big battles it can provide. For the question you have all been waiting for, yes, a fee will be a part of Warhammer, but here me out. The quests and story and what the war is about is very important to the game, and episodic content has already been talked about, so an evolving game is present, which lends lots of replay value because who knows what kind of new things they can come up with. There is lots of room to move things in different directions. Who is to say that all the public quests will be the same. When the end game is about taking siege to cities and keeps and not about level, gear, and such, it lends itself more. Plus, who knows what mythic has up their sleeve for content down the line. New public quests? New things hidden in the city or out in battlefield? Maybe new storylines will pop up. Maybe one day a man appears in the back of a battlefield and upon searching you find a paper that leads to a whole new storyline. Who knows? I know this, never has any other subscription based game had that potential. The pricing plan is such that the more months you buy at one time, the less it comes out to per month of play. I know for one if what I have played in the beta turns out as good as it has on a full scale, you can bet I won’t mind.

So in summary, if you always wanted grand scale PvP, love stories of honour, bloodshed, war, and heroism, I’d suggest this game. I think its going to be a contender in the MMO field. A lot of fun has been had so far. Open beta is starting soon, followed by a headstart into the game and then full release comes September 18, 2008. I give this game an 8 out of 10, and hope it sees long term success because I will be looking forward to the episodic content.