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LG 34UM67 Freesync IPS Panel - Is 21:9 Gaming Worth it?

2015-04-03
hey what's going on guys Jays two cents here and today we are gonna answer the question that has been on everybody's mind when the hell is the r9 390x gonna launch and my answer to that question is I have absolutely no idea so we're going to move into question number two which is is ultra wide 20 1 by 9 aspect ratio gaming really all it's cracked up to be no no we're going to find out in this video this one right now the new EVGA silent series power supplies offer excellent silence and efficiency through their new EVGA Eco mode technology and also features a seven year warranty for worryfree gaming click the link in the description to learn more well guys sitting on the test bench behind me we have LG's brand new 34 um 67 TN IPS 2560 by 1080 P 21 by 9 aspect ratio freesync panel we took a look at this thing at CES and this was one of the first panels being marketed as utilizing a Indies freesync technology so that's why I actually have an AMD card sitting on the bench now for the AMD card we'll be using to test this today it is the Asus matrix 290 X so we're gonna actually see how freesync works with this bad boy but there's three things that are kind of puzzling about the specs of this monitor one it is obviously being touted as a gaming monitor with the fact that it has free sync if you weren't gaming on it who the hell cares but they're not has freesync technology built in but that being that it's also an IPS panel IPS panels tend to have much lower pixel refresh rate or response time when it comes to games or anything fast motion anything over 5 milliseconds it's kind of considered slow by today's day and age especially when you compare them to TN panels which are anywhere from one to two especially like the asus rog swift which is a 1 millisecond panel or even the new Acer xB 2 8 0 HK sorry I can't remember that which is a 4k panel but TN with a 1 millisecond response time so it kind of makes you wonder free sync with IPS who exactly is their demographic and the other thing being that it's a 21 by 9 aspect ratio which is me it's not going to be as widely utilized when it comes to a lot of your games as you know the standard 16 by 9 or 16 by 10 ratio that we've been accustomed to for years leading to you having to hack some of your registry files to get a lot of your games to utilize that space without giving you just a black bar on the side of the screen and because this thing is an IPS panel though I'm more interested in personally I would be more interested in its panel for productivity and workflow things like video color correction or you know Photoshop once the screen is calibrated even let's I P s it still does need to be calibrated out of the box to become perfect but still the colors are going to be much more realistic on an IPS panel than anything TN before we move into some of the live gaming and kind of off-the-cuff responses of how I feel about gaming on this thing let's go ahead and talk about some of the physical aspects of this now as mentioned this is a 34 inch panel they do also have a 29 inch Edition out there as well but because this thing is so wide and so short in terms of height I find 34 inches to kind of be the perfect sweet spot where 29 is just way too small I want to say that's what that's what she said joke but that's just ridiculous now it does have a little bit of tilt adjustment but it has absolutely no swivel and no height adjustment built into the base you get two options when it comes to height you have to completely unbolt it and rebuilt it in those two different positions to give you any sort of height adjustment but because the thing has an acrylic base plate on there or stand or whatever you want to call it it does kind of give it a neat free-floating sort of effect to it but then that's kind of completely killed off by the fact that you can now see the cables running behind the acrylic piece there and now that kind of kills the fact that it felt like it was floating otherwise the panel does feel like it's being suspended in midair which is kind of a neat effect controlling the on-screen stuff is very simple through a joystick that's pretty much built in underneath the bottom of the middle of the screen I call it a joystick it's really just more like a d-pad that you can just move around and go to different on-screen options now built into the menu option there is also refreshed time adjustment on there with high middle and low and off where basically you can I guess take over some control of the response time of the pixels I guess we'll kind of play around with that a little bit in the live testing I'm not entirely sure exactly how that's going to work out now when it comes to the free sync one of the things that a lot of people have said about this panel that seems to be kind of odd is the fact that the free sync range is only effective between 48 and 75 Hertz but that's a really weird range considering at this resolution 2560 by 1080 it is possible for non high-end graphics cards things like the 290 X or the 290 or even the 285 are the 285 or 280x to dip down below that 48 Hertz now high-end cards are going to be hurt by this considering the fact that they are going to be slowed down to 75 Hertz so it's one of those things where it's a really strange range of why 48 to 75 was picked considering the panel vendors pretty much are the ones that are able to control the range of which these monitors are going to be responding at when it comes to free sync now there are multiple inputs on this thing DVI HDMI and DisplayPort but if you want to use free sync you have to use the display port because free sync is using DisplayPort 1.2 as its standard for using free sync so anyway let's go ahead and turn around let's get in is playing some games on this thing and it's just kind of get some first-hand experience on what it's like gaming on this thing I'm not too concerned about the refresh rate or free sync or any of that personally I kind of care more about the aspect ratio of 20:1 by 9 now the amount of real estate you have here is definitely no joke I mean it's pretty much to perfect squared screens side-by-side not even a 4 by 3 let's go ahead and let's try an FPS first we'll go ahead and try some battlefield 4 sorry guys I don't have hardline installed on this machine yet so here we are in the battlefield 4 test range you can see maybe you can't I don't know if we go over here to the monitor settings we do have free sync currently on it's right there and so you can see that also on the side here we do have two black bars now initially I thought that these were going to be probably because maybe the game wasn't working with 21 by 9 but this is just the menu because as you can see here I hit resume in the game we do get the entire side back it's very very smooth that's for sure it doesn't feel like there's any perceived input lag which that 14 milliseconds could end up you know that's what it could feel like am I gonna hit that thing Oh so what I want to check here real quick though is what that setting for the response time was and how that actually plays in all of this so this is found in the picture adjust there's also a black stabilizer so we can you can see here for FPS games we can kind of play around the blacks a little bit here sharpness you can really make it too sharp if you want and then response time as you can see we've got low middle and high so I'm going to set it to response time high because technically I don't know that makes me think that response is going to be high like high response time would be a high number that would be bad so let me make it low now just to compare I don't know I don't feel any sort of difference with this I'm not entirely sure how exactly let's turn it off I don't know that's supposed to be just some sort of enhancement or what doesn't really feel any different to me though boom I do like the extra peripheral on this if you're playing a game like Battlefield and you're flying around or whatever you've got man you can see for days so you can see our fps in the top right where you pretty much just stuck to 60 at least here inside the test but the test range trying to see if I can just get that number to fluctuate at all so but that's alright thought means 60fps is extremely smooth when it's locked there when there's very when you crash into buildings like that your FPS matters no it's it's extremely smooth this doesn't feel like standard 60fps like with a regular vsync it's certainly a smooth I mean the 290x is definitely doing its job and pushing all these pixels and it freesync is clearly doing its job in terms of keeping the FPS completely locked I mean make sure my head's not blocking that number of B as you can see it is definitely I mean I'm not seeing any tearing on the screen whatsoever I do have motion blur turned up people are always like Jay why do you run motion blur I like motion blur um see fov fifty fine everyone's always like fov seven-day up I'll be 70 so let's do that and let's go ahead and turn motion blur down off see I don't like this fov it's all fisheye looking so that's a personal preference personally but as you can see it makes no difference at all to the FPS it's still extremely smooth to see what I can ping this guy to this guy so close I want to hit this guy nope that's gonna miss oh I got him nevermind his wing so here it is with fov 70 I personally don't like fov 70 it feels very fisheye to me but that's just a personal thing well clearly Tomb Raider is capable of rendering out the entire game across the monitor without stretching it out or requiring any sort of modification to any files I am noticing that there appears to be a little bit of stuttering here and there graphics card starting to I'm going to jump in the water and die graphics cards starting to actually ramp up a bit temperatures are probably really hot on that 290x but vsync is off so let's put it to double buffer even though the panel should be doing the work I don't think it matters but it did indeed just smooth out quite a bit pretty certain if I jump in there I'm going to die let's see no no Schmidt yeah this is an amazing aspect ratio especially for games like this I mean the amount of peripheral view you have especially for yeah especially for games like this where you need to see around to the sides so low my old friend yeah she got a gun and she pissed now I totally thought I had a here that was not gonna be able to take advantage of the aspect ratio and that was Counter Strike global Offensive considering the age of the game the how age of source and all that I figure there's no way that this game would have been set up to actually utilize 21 by 9 especially since it's not in the map that's not in the settings you have to use yeah I love this you have to use 16 by 9 in the settings as you can see here it's under 16 by 9 but the resolution shows up 20 2560 by 1080 so yeah it's actually able to utilize this and I wonder if this is something that would give someone a competitive edge have a little bit more peripheral in a FPS like this I'm totally dead but as you can see Counter Strike global Offensive uses 21 by name well alrighty then so I find myself in a pretty interesting position here with the 34 um 67 from LG and that is that I love the aspect ratio from a Productivity perspective the amount of real estate you have but how compact it is on your desk versus running some sort of an NV surround or an eyefinity setup and the fact that games do seem to be utilizing it pretty well and those titles that aren't are being updated constantly for you to be able to utilize 21 by 9 or those registry hacks as well that are available to use but my real major flaw with this panel and the one thing that I just can't seem to get past for me is that 1080 resolution I've been using 1440p panels and 4k panels now to the point to where going back to a 1080p vertical resolution just I don't think I can do it I'm so used to looking to that that Q HD or UHD now to the point to where 1080 like this I can see pixels even sitting at a you know good three feet away I can see the pixels and it bothers me I'm used to not seeing pixels anymore freesync is doing a very good job at keeping the frame timing very consistent so there's no stuttering lagging or tearing of course I am running a 290x with it it's not overclocked by the way this is a stock settings for the matrix and I am running it with the 5820k in a Intel setup but you might start running into problems with lower end graphics cards where if it's not able to drive that many pixels because there is quite a bit more pixels than this and there is in 1920 by 1080 you're going to find that lower end graphics cards are going to start bumping down underneath that 48 Hertz freesync refresh rate where then it just turns into a standard you know the way LCD crystals refresh and there could be tearing even down at that low refresh rate but the fact that it's a 1080p vertical for me is just it's one of the reasons why I can't make this my main panel I'm still using the 1440p Swift you know 28 28 inch Swift as my main panel on skunkworks over here and I don't know how if that's going to change anytime soon especially since I'm running in video graphics cards on the main system I would lose out on the free sync on this entirely so it would be a little bit wasted on skunkworks but I do think it fits perfectly right here fits perfectly underneath the Shelf perfect width between the edge of the desk and the test bench it's got a pretty nice home I just to find a place to hook up the Acer maybe wall mounted up there is something the 280 HK for K 1 millisecond panel yeah that's pretty insane so what do you guys think of the 21 by 9 aspect ratio sound off down in the comments or hit me up on Twitter if you guys want to tell me what you think about this I think this is probably going to be one of the aspect ratios of the future we've seen them becoming more and more prevalent especially since CES this year and I'm especially with the curve technology now I do see a lot of people going with this type of format I could certainly see myself running one of these as a main panel if I wasn't already surrounded by LCD technology everywhere alright guys well thanks for watching today's video sorry the content quality isn't as high as I would have liked now that I'm full time officially last day has already been put in I can start working on upping the quality of the content that give you guys up in the quantity but being the quality so that you guys can have a great time here on the channel as always guys thanks for watching I really shouldn't be making a video right now cuz I feel like crap I know you guys want to hear that but I'm giving you at least a little bit of an excuse as to why I sound this way but I still wanted to make a video for you guys so I figured I know I said I was gonna do a bill blog I'm still not doing a bill dog I'm keeping my promise on that
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