Gadgetory

hello and welcome to the first and possibly the final installment of what I'm calling James tries stuff for the first time today I'm gonna use whatever tools I can find just laying around to make the most pointless PC gaming setup possible Hey look what are these doing here 349 inch 32 by 9 gaming monitors each one of these is designed to be an elegant standalone solution for achieving both of productivity and gaming benefits usually reserved for double or even triple monitor setups but hey I'm super naive why not connect all three of them to create a 180 degrees semicircle of pixel paradise builds da GG is at it again with the stock cooling showdown up to four thousand dollars and hardware prizes are up for grabs for the most highly voted systems and for people who simply vote click the link below to join welcome back step one is to get a computer particularly one that has enough video out ports to connect one to one to each of your three monitors now it is possible to go thrum one DisplayPort two like a hub where you split off to other DisplayPort cables that might be possible depending on the resolutions of your monitors but it's always better to have a dedicated cable especially considering that DisplayPort is pretty janky at the best of times I'm also using the highest quality cables that I could find because the DisplayPort spec actually is only built around a cable length of three meters which is about precisely 9.8 feet so if you're gonna go beyond that which you may well do considering that if you're using monitors this wide end to end they're like 10 feet if you need to go beyond 9.8 feet with a display port cable the longer the cable the higher quality they should be for our computer we're going to be using a Corsair one Pro because it has an RT X xx atti inside which I know is capable of pushing all the pixels I need to these giant displays so that's just one less thing to screw me over the next thing you need is a bunch of monitors now ideally you would be using three identical monitors at least with the same resolution and the same aspect ratio but it does help if they're actually the same maked model because then they're gonna have the same sync polarity and more uniform colors across all of it we don't have that here today what we have although these are each of them 32 by 949 inch monitors there are three different brands we've got an LG Adel and a Samsung behind me the Samsung has a resolution of 3840 by 1080 and a refresh rate of 144 Hertz while the other two although they do share the same LG made panel which is a bonus they have a resolution of 50 120 by 1440 and a refresh rate of 60 Hertz so we we're just gonna have to find out if this mishmash screws us in the end the first thing I'm noticing here is that this is kind of stupid these are already so wide that I don't know if it would be practical for basically anybody's workflow to have them arranged to like this the other thing I'm thinking about here is the keyboard in the mouse okay if I'm over here it's a little awkward especially if these were turned in more and I was more surrounded you'd be a little weird to be typing over here and crank up my neck this way I got an idea okay so I found some scraps extruded aluminum that we had from a 16 k gaming and I've never used this stuff before but Alex said it's pretty easy to work with yeah okay now for the piece de resistance that's more like it now that our setup is completely ridiculous let's try actually gaming follow me okay so you'll see we're only using one third of our potential girth here so that's no good go into the settings the resolution 51 20 by 1440 is the resolution of one of these if I go into windowed mode nope no option to do that okay I think it's time we opened the Nvidia control panel okay so the point of surround is to make your computer think that you have just one monitor with one resolution okay let's play it safe and start with just two of our monitors one by two will pick the LG and the Dell so ten thousand two hundred and forty pixels that's the width of those two screens it's created one combined resolution because it's gonna treat it like it's one monitor very cool so let's see if we can get it to do that with all three monitors we're going to change our topology to one by three select every monitor including the Samsung okay so I was expecting what like 12,000 this is 57 60 by 1080 if I go to calculator and divide that by three monitors 1920 it's treating this like each one of these is 1920 by 1080 I think it's because you're not allowed to mix and match resolutions so I mean we can try this Wow stretch city okay this is kind of cool and immersive it's not working properly but I don't think it's because of the 1920 surround error thing I think it's because this game is just not meant to do this see how it gets really stretched out on the sides like that car and the car looks really close and when I go like this it looks a lot farther away and that's because this game is rendering with only one camera position games that are meant to be played like this they're gonna render from multiple camera positions and then the result is gonna be that teammates don't look like that oh boy good god good gravy okay okay okay let's get out of here what if I forced all these to be the same resolution so one way I could do that which would suck would be to just run my higher as ones at a lower rest so I'd run them all at 38 40 by 1080 that's not that cool because why did I buy or have sent to this company higher res monitors so instead we're gonna try to do super sample the low res one to render as though it is 50 120 by 1440 there are some drawbacks even if you can gets around to work like let's say I had monitors that were all the same and surround work for me and it was awesome there's still some drawbacks because it makes it seem like it's all one monitor which is not ideal when you're not gaming if I'm just using my desktop and it's treated like one monitor then when I go to maximize one of my windows for example you're gonna have like a Windows Explorer window that's just like eight feet of white and it's not easy to just place a window on only one monitor for example and like your clock is gonna be way over there while your Windows Start menu is way over there for that reason a lot of people who game with surround on will actually turn it off when they're not gaming and then turn it back on when they go to game again which sucks because it actually takes anywhere between one and five minutes to get it all configured every time now a lot of these problems can be mitigated or outright solved by using software like Ultraman or Display fusion which is way better because then you can just stay in surround mode all the time and not have to go back and do the display settings like I have to right now and move stuff around okay let's see if this works I go into my Windows display settings I now have a new resolution for my crappy monitor my crappy thousand-dollar awesome monitor so now we're gonna go back into surround and see if we can get the coveted 15,000 360 horizontal pixel resolution that we were looking for no there's just no there's no making it work you can't even trick it but who cares cuz we still might be able to get the result we want sure it's not gonna be exclusive full screen in our games we'll take a slight performance hit but we can still have lots of fun so let's try some of the games that are designed to be used in setup like this I'm gonna look at a list of games that are actually known to work with widescreen Far Cry 5 we have that one this intro sequence is a far cry from being enjoyable options video aspect ratio custom window mode windowed all the way all the way oh whoa no ok now I think I'm gonna try just running the benchmark because I don't wanna get caught in the 20 minutes of cutscenes this game starts with nice nice those hay bales aren't really even stretched yeah they're closer but it's not super distorted things look proportional this is pretty dank I don't have to look over there but having it there is more immersive all right enough Far Cry now I want to try a racing game naturally I heard that project cars 2 is pretty good for this kind of thing so options holy cow look at this I don't even have to go into video there's a button specifically saying triple screen configure your settings to match your triple screen setup hell yeah triple screen spanning check these are probably wrong but I'm gonna say that's fine okay and again you can see on the text of Toyota it's not stretched out right okay this is pretty sweet oh look one hand well then that rearview mirror is like the same size as my actual rearview mirror in my car this is like almost life-size it's pretty cool and just like real life I go the wrong way okay this was a pretty stupid setup but I still learned a few things number one if you're into widescreen surround gaming then make sure that the games you want to play actually support it because it really comes down to the games more than anything if you're into racing games and flight Sims then you're probably good to go and I think more and more regular mainstream shooter type games are supporting it because 21 by 9 monitors are more mainstream but this aspect ratio is still kind of rare and then getting three of them is dumb number two make sure all of your monitors are the same resolution and aspect ratio because that caused headaches like we just have fewer options because if we have the setup that we do and number three is this worth it this particular setup that these monitors is this the good way to go I don't think so because first of all it's super expensive yes it's more immersive but for the cost like this is 4500 dollars worth of monitors is it really that much more immersive than just having I don't know one of them they don't really have a very tight curve that's an 1800 our curved one if you had three monitors this aspect ratio that had 1800 our curve then it would be a tighter circle around you but hey if it's all about dick-measuring then this gives you a huge dick so speaking of things that are awesome to have in your life here's Linus with a sponsor spot Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more and their premium membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes on Musto topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work that you love Skillshare is more affordable than most learning platforms out there with an annual subscription costing less than $10 a month and the first 500 of you to use the promo link in the description will get your first two months for free so go check it out now so thanks for watching guys if this video suck then you can hit that button but if you liked it like it get subscribe check out the links in the description we're going to buy the stuff 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