Gadgetory

all right so we're taking a look at yet another new product this one's from gigabytes specifically their aura steam it's the Auris ad to 7 QD that's correct so consider this sort of a first look video no actually it's it's like a second look video because technically the first time I check this monitor out was at CES in January which was like a month ago man time is flying and I was really impressed by it my first impressions were super positive and I was like 71 I want to take a closer look at it so this this video is not sponsored I can talk all the crap I want on this thing I'm not getting paid a cent they just sent me a unit and I'm giving you my first impressions second impressions whatever so on the surface this is sort of your typical high-end gaming panel at 599 US dollars it's got all those high-end specs you're probably familiar with like well 27-inch 2560 by 1440 IPS 144 hertz one millisecond response time HDR and free sync supported and yada yada yada there's nothing inherently unique about any of those specs as robust and impressive as they are there's a bunch of other offerings at this price or even lower with all the same specs we're really sets this monitor apart from the rest is surprisingly its OSD and all the various features that are crammed inside of it so we're gonna be taking a closer look at that and I'll tell you why exactly it's special but for now let's talk about the panel itself apart from supporting HDR you also get a 95% dcpip three color gamut which is quite a bit wider than srgb or Adobe RGB so wider range of colors that's that's always good the panel advertises a 10-bit color depth when in reality it's actually an 8-bit panel using FRC which is a form of dithering so it kind of switches between two colors really quickly to trick your eyes into seeing a third color that's not really there giving the illusion of a wider color gamut it's not quite as good as a native 10 bit panel by any stretch however it does have a small leg up over a standard 8 bit panel that being said if you're just gaming on this thing or you're doing some light content creation like you have a youtube channel or something the color on this panel is more than adequate I mean that the colors are really rich and vibrant everything kind of pops without being oversaturated however if you're looking to do more professional work and serious hardcore color grading I would probably upgrade to a native tended panel very least the screen itself is pretty matte it's a relatively anti glare which is great especially if you're a gaming during the day and you've got like a window behind you or something like that the bezels are super thin on three sides you've also got a nice-looking chin with some light Oris branding and a power LED at the bottom which is white tucked away beneath that is a joystick for navigating the built-in OSD which as we'll see in a moment is almost completely useless behind the panel you'll see a bunch of RGB lighting that's on the display itself as well as the very nice stand I don't know how I feel about this it looks really good but it's also behind the monitor why can't we have more RGB on the front of the panel I mean obviously that could be really distracting but just give us the option to turn it off I just I don't know how important it is to have RGB lighting in a place where you can't see it while you're gaming on the display I don't know you guys let me know what you think about that because it looks really nice you can customize it within the OSD and things like that but it's just kind of out of sight out of mind I feel like some of it is wasted on on my eyes the monitor stand gives you the full range of adjustments tilt pan swivel and rotate up to 90 degrees it's also built like a tank the actual base is completely metal you can probably kill someone with it and the actual spine while it's plastic for the most part is still very durable as well there's even a nice big carrying handle at the top that seems very rugged and built to last if you're keen on wall mounting you can remove the panel from the stand with a couple quick release latches and underneath there you'll find some base amounts there's a nice collection of ports back here including three USB 3.0 two of which are downstream one is upstream that upstream will have to be connected to your PC in order to take advantage of a lot of the features that are in the OSD which we'll take a look at momentarily you've got a single DisplayPort 1.4 port which is the port you're gonna have to use if you want to take advantage of free sync with a geforce 10 series card or newer as its not gonna translate over hdmi 2.0 like it will with an AMD card you've also got a pair of hdmi 2.0 ports mic and headphone jacks a Kensington lock and an AC power plug with an internal power brick so you don't have the deal or fuss around with an external power brick so I think from a hardware perspective the Auris team has definitely put together a high-quality and attractive monitor that's definitely on par in terms of the looks and feels Department with other panels in its price range and even some that are a bit more expensive than it but that's just the hardware side let's talk about software with that OSD now remember before when I said that the little joystick here with the built-in OSD was virtually useless that's because available for download with this panel is the OSD sidekick application it's basically just a piece of software that runs on your Windows desktop functions like a regular program but it allows you to control every single feature that this panel offers with a keyboard and mouse this is kind of the equivalent or at least it brings me back to when motherboard manufacturers started going with their full keyboard and mouse supported uef eyes when before we just kind of had a more basic BIOS and just what a what a game-changer that was I'm getting the same sort of feeling here and I wouldn't be surprised of other monitor manufacturers some point down the line started following this trend and I hope they do because it's a lot easier obviously to navigate with a keyboard and mouse than it is with any sort of you know hardware buttons on the monitor let's just tip of the iceburg though let's talk about some of the actual features I don't know where to start so I'm just gonna start with the black equalizer the black equalizer basically lifts up the black levels in a dark scene so if you happen to be playing a game with dark scenes for example the latest Resident Evil 2 remake and you're scared of the dark perhaps or you want to be able to see those zombies from a bit further away down a dark corridor you can up your black equalizer and things in the dark will be much easier to see there's also an aim stabilizer setting that effectively reduces ghosting and creates a more perceptibly smooth image and the way they do that is kind of like ultra low motion blur where they sort of flicker the screen in between frames I haven't used any technology like this extensively I would think for me personally it would start to fatigue my eyes more quickly but I guess I can't say for sure it also effectively dims the the overall brightness of the screen so you might have to up the brightness within the OSD to sort of compensate for that with an OSD sidekick are also a number of game assist features the first of which is basically cheating it's a crosshair overlay so you could be noscope in newbs you know with an op and csgo and there's no way for a developer to prevent it because it's all within the monitors hardware it's it's basically cheating I'm still a terrible gamer with it but I'm sure some people will be able to exploit it a lot more effectively than I well they've taken it even further with letting you customize your own crosshair so if you wanted to pixel out your ex-girlfriends face or something like that that's something you can do it's 2019 screw it there's also a timer and a counter that you can throw up on the screen they're both very basic tools but also incredibly useful for example if you want to monitor your ability cooldowns you can throw up a timer you can customize exactly if you want it to time up or a countdown counter can be really useful for streaming let's say I mean I've done this in the past where I'm like alright for every hundred dollars donated to charity I'll take a shot on stream and in the past I've used like a third party software to actually count the number of shots I've taken for my viewers to see but this is all just sort of an integrated solution that makes things that much more simple you can also enable display alignment which I'm still not a hundred percent sure what this is for my guess would be if you have multiple monitors that you're putting side-by-side or even you know top to bottom that you can align them more accurately or precisely but again I have no idea I mean you've also got picture in picture picture by picture with a couple different settings their dashboard you have a dashboard that's kind of similar to MSI Afterburner OSD where it can give you a bunch of different system diagnostics like your GPU CPU temperatures frequencies your frame rate although the FPS counter was either spitting out the incorrect values they were like extremely high or it wasn't working it also hopefully will fix that in the future patch and it's worth noting you can move this in any corner of the screen along with the counter and the timer and things like that naturally these are all hot keyable functions as well so there's a hotkey tab that lets you pretty much bind almost any function that the sidekick features the last feature here is a and C or active noise-cancelling which gigabyte actually demoed for me at their suite I got to try it out firsthand and it worked really well I was very impressed actually the way the demo worked was they had two systems I was gaming on one and they had a rep gaming on the other who was supposed to represent sort of your typical scumbag gamer in a public server he was mashing his keyboard really loudly with chaé MX blue switches he was blaring music on his speakers while talking into his headset mic and with a and C enabled on his system I could only hear his voice which was pretty crystal clear from what I could tell I mean it was fairly noisy in the suite but I could hear him exactly what he was saying without any of the ambient noise couldn't hear the speaker's couldn't hear the keyboard I was very impressed and I was using a pair of really crappy earbuds as well and bear in mind this is all being processed by the monitor so you're not wasting any system resources there's zero overhead here and overall it just seems like a really useful feature I could definitely see it as being a nice value add for streamers who want to give their viewers the best possible experience they don't want any ambient noise coming through there Stream definitely a nice built-in feature to have and the app also lets you choose how aggressive you want the ANC effect to be while letting you select how close are far away the microphone is from your mouth in order to give you the best possible performance I really like the approach that Oris has taken with the OSD on this display especially it being their first display like good job you guys knocked it out of the park that being said it's still a very early product it's very new and the firmware updates aren't quite there yet so there are some issues and I already mentioned the framerate counter wasn't really working that's kind of a minor issue compared to all of the hotkey problems I've been having so depending on the game that I'm in the hotkeys are either limited or they just flat-out don't work at all and like I mentioned before a lot of the features in the OSD are reliant on being bindable and being able to pull them up at a moment's notice there's no point in out tabbing out of your game just to enable a setting and then all typing back in no one's gonna do that so hopefully with a future update I know gigabyte said that they're currently working on a new firmware that's supposed to address all these issues that'll all be fixed and at that point I can give my confident recommendation of this panel so given its price and its fairly unique feature set I would say that this monitor doesn't exactly target your everyday typical gamer but rather a niche type of gamer that you know wants a timer and they want a counter and they want the active noise-cancelling built-in there's a specific type of gamer who has been waiting for this monitor for a long time and I think for those users the premium here is going to be well worth it in the long run assuming that all the various bugs that I just mentioned get ironed out soon so that's it guys let me know what you think about this thing down in the comments and also which of its various features do you see yourself utilizing the most I'm actually kind of curious what you guys have to say about that feel free to toss a like on the video before you go it helps me a lot and get subscribed to the channel for more tech stuff coming at you really soon have a good one guys I will see you all in the next video