Gadgetory

with its factory tuning and data center DNA and Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts alright so this video might be coming at a bit of a strange time if the focus was going to be on this exact model of 4k monitor which was first shown off way back at Computex 2013 and has been available pretty much since then at around 3,000 to 3,500 dollars an early adopter price point if I've ever seen one no instead the focus of this video is going to be on my experience of using a 4k display because this is the first time I've actually brought in the opportunity to try one in the comfort of my own home and at work and now that 4k is finally coming down in price with a Seuss's p b 28 7 q coming at around 800 bucks for a 28 inch model it is a very exciting time to take a look at this sexy technology so first I'll give a rundown of this one this very gorgeous P Q 321 Q that I guess I can hold hostage now until a su sends one of the new ones unlike the low-cost variants that will feature TN panels of various quality this monitor features an egg's or indium gallium zinc oxide based panel there's a great post actually by a complete stranger who goes by the handle of Glenn wing on overclock dotnet linked in the video description that does a great job of explaining the benefits of this technology but in short because in exile panels controlling transistors are smaller respond more quickly and can even be clearer we can get faster response times higher pixel densities and more power efficient or even transparent displays for the rest of the specs we'll move pretty fast here this thing is a beast it weighs 30 pounds much of which is the robust stand it consumes about as much power as an idling gaming desktop at about 80 to 90 watts and it's got a 31 and a half inch 3840 by 2160 LED edge lit screen with one of the best anti glare coatings that I've ever seen it's actually I think the perfect balance between reducing reflections and still keeping colors vibrant looking not scattering the light too much the unit is super thin thirty five millimeters at the back which contrasts sharply with bedell 30-inch monitor that we use for high-res benchmarking and this thinness is enabled by an external power brick versus having an internal power supply I've seen other reviewers complain about this approach but I disagree a hundred percent I would rather take up space on my floor with big power bricks than space on my desk which I can actually use it's not like I'll be moving this thing around speaking of movement it has height adjust pivot and tilt but no portrait rotate mode you can actually take the screws off and then put it in portrait mode permanently but it's not something that you're going to switch between easily it has a side mounted DisplayPort 1.2 connector with two side mounted HDMI connectors it should be noted that due to the way this monitor works it's basically like two monitors side by side with no bezel in between you will need to use either a DisplayPort device that supports multi stream SATs 1.2 or higher or two separate HDMI cables going into both ports if you want to run the monitor at 4k 60 Hertz with stronger DisplayPort implementations in HDMI - coming soon this won't be an issue on future models but it is something to bear in mind here the monitor uses a sharp exit panel capable of producing 1.07 billion colors with a reasonable degree of accuracy but with some tendency towards a roamer a warmer overall tone to the image it should be noted that it was never really marketed as a pro art series for serious color work so it should still be good enough for most people the bottoms for controlling the on-screen display are around the back and this is unusual but they actually aren't even labeled on the front they're only label on the back of the monitor it's okay though an optional sticker is included if you want to be able to see what you're doing by given that the on-screen display doesn't have a ton of useful options like a sousou's pro art series does I would probably just leave the front label off for a super clean aesthetic if it was mine okay back to that panel type again I've bent in this view time XO is not actually strictly speaking a panel type like IPS or TN and apart from telling us that it sings o based a soos hasn't been entirely forthright with what type of panel is in the PQ 321 Q but on PC monitors dot info they figure it's an IPS or similar display which makes sense given the strong colors and outstanding viewing angles if you want more details on the monitor particularly with respect to color reproduction for professional work or more nitty-gritty details of the spec Anan tected an excellent review of it which I'll link in the video description the rest of this video will focus on my experience using and my thoughts on the upgrade to 4k so I'll open with this a bigger screen is not always a great upgrade I used a 30 inch Samsung monitor as my daily driver for a couple of years and while it was great once I got used to it scaling back to 27 as I recently did has actually been just fine too but some people will always want bigger and better so if you do want a huge display then you need to consider pixel density there was a period of time when many folks particularly gamers we're buying 32 inch TVs with resolutions as low as 1366 by 768 and then lolling at me at LANs for paying so much for my 1920 by 1200 24 inch monitor which was obviously much smaller but that kind of solution was always very fatiguing for me to look at if you increase the size but not the pixel density text and icon sizes are effectively blown up making everything look blocky if you increase both pixel density and size proportionally you get effectively more of the same level of detail and same size text and icons but when you ramp up resolution faster than size you get a very different computing experience and everything starts to look much more crisp or as Apple would call it retina II at a hundred and forty pixels per inch the PQ 321 Q is the highest density desktop monitor I've ever used by a significant margin about thirty percent better than a 27-inch 1440p display and it's incredible to see how sharp everything looks the only challenge is that while ramping up resolution gives us more screen real estate to spread out our work it also decreases the size of elements now to the point where it's hard to read text and click on things accurately unless the solution to this of course is scaling which is what Smart OS is like Android and iOS do but unfortunately Windows doesn't handle scaling and amazingly well because even with improvements in Windows 8 which I unfortunately don't use yet third-party software makers need to support it for it to work properly from within applications what this means is that if I leave the scale at a hundred percent Windows Explorer text has the same sharpness as text in 7-zip or steam but if I scale to 150 percent all of a sudden text in third-party applications can look terrible by comparison is not just isolated to these two applications there are some other things that behave strangely at such enormous resolution as well remember that this is effectively for 16 inch 1080p monitors side-by-side and stacked with no bezels between them websites designed for fixed width will just float in a sea of emptiness in the middle of your screen and dynamic websites won't fare much better with elements stretched out to the edges of the screen or even just broken outright one solution to that is to split your monitor into virtual smaller ones using third-party software but that'll just take some tinkering for you to get things set up the way that you want it it's just something to think about speaking of the way you want things for all the complaining I've done about scaling and text and whatever else the 4k experience when you're doing it right when you're enjoying native content is absolutely unreal it's one thing to see a 4k TV at a trade show it's another thing entirely to have one two feet in front of your play vase playing all of your favorite games natively at 4k because PC games support that stuff as long as you have the graphics or spot for it it is a great time to be a PC gamer because of the improved pixel density I find myself hardly even needing anti-aliasing anymore endured three I went from 0 X - 2 X - 4 X so then it got to the point where I had to have my nose like 6 inches from the screen to see any jaggies whatsoever when you add to that the beautiful colors and respectable but not amazing processing leg on this monitor the experience is unlike anything else I've always found that surround would be OK for me but the bezel just totally takes away from the immersion well this it's just fair in your field of view and it looks amazing I mean I think the craziest and most exciting thing about it is that while I found over 30 inches to be little bit big this technology is coming soon to smaller display sizes which means even higher pixel density and at lower prices 4k might not matter much to me for my TV but for my desktop computer it makes a really big difference it's like when I moved from 24-inch 1200 P to 30-inch 1600 P all over again it's absolutely beautiful the one thing I really need to see though before I'd be willing to drop 800 to a thousand dollars on a really nice 4k monitor is g-sync support I noticed this at Nvidia's Montreal event when they had some 4k TV gaming demos running but the larger the screen the more noticeable giant tearing artifacts across it are to me vsync is a solution but it adds more leg to what I'm already expecting to be slower than average monitors in this first round of affordable 4k monitors Aladdin like tests in any of them yet so when a soos delivers about $1000 4k 60 Hertz g-sync monitor they will not be able to take my money fast enough thank you guys very much for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have any comments duh if you want to discuss this product we have a link in the video description to the Linus tech tips forum we also have a link for supporting us if you felt the need to do that you think our videos are great we should keep making them you can give us a monthly contribution you can buy a t-shirt or you can even do stuff as simple as changing your amazon bookmark in your browser to one that has our affiliate code in it so we get a little kickback every time you buy stuff I think that pretty much wraps it up guys thank you for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos you