Gadgetory

PC gaming from the couch in many ways it's the Holy Grail but it takes a few special ingredients to make it work bringing your computer into the living room well that's easy enough and these days there are plenty of powerful small form-factor machines that look perfectly at home in your entertainment unit then there's the wireless controls well fortunately cordless peripherals have made huge performance and battery gains in recent years and now they fit nicely inside these cushioned lap boards sorry couch wood and then finally there's the TV which is probably 4k and definitely bigger than your gaming monitor but usually only 60 Hertz and bound to suffer from dog slow input lag so yeah the TV is basically always the weakest link when it comes to living room PC gaming setups or is it this right here is the HP omen X Imperium 65 the first production BFG D or big format gaming display to reach our studio but could it possibly be worth the diaper filling price of $5,000 the lien Li 0 1 1 D has just been given a facelift by Razer now compatible with Razer chroma devices it also comes with customizable underglow powered by Razer synapse 3 click the link below to get a chance to win one for yourself if you found yourself salivating over our review of the 4k 144 Hertz Asus PG 27 UQ gaming monitor last summer then the TLDR is this this puppy here is just about as ballin as that $2,000 panty butter was but at over four times the surface area it's pretty much the TV we have always wanted like I am already trying to figure out how to get this video done as quickly as I possibly can so that I can just take it home and play games on it by myself in a dark room for all time why you might ask well because the Imperium 65 like all BFG DS right now is guaranteed to have a laundry list of vital stats including 4k resolution g-sync ultimate which means not only g-sync but also HD are a 120 Hertz native refresh rate ultra low input lag and as a total bonus a built-in Nvidia shield TV I mean I already have one of those but like hey values value and those things are worth like 180 bucks on their own so then let's go through each of these points in finer detail starting with appropriately resolution its 3840 by 2160 UHD so you can get inside of 2 feet from this thing before you start seeing the individual pixels now it's thick by modern TV standards but that's for good reason it uses a direct rather than Edge LED backlight with full array local dimming across 384 zones which means they're just under 5 square inches each and they managed to sustain brightness on this thing of 715 it's with peak brightness of 1000 nits earning this puppy the display HDR 1000 certification along with that of course comes great colors so it's an 8-bit plus FRC panel but in our tests it achieved over 94% of the DCI p3 color space and it's got professional-grade color accuracy right out of the box also while they are by no means OLED level the blacks are pretty deep because it uses a VA panel so if you have black bars on your content it's not nearly as distracting as it might be on an IPS type display with that said for strictly movie watching the Imperium 65 was never gonna be a great value so let's talk gaming now this is far from the only TV with a 120 Hertz refresh rate but the difference is that it's real like the actual screen refreshes at full 4k resolution 120 times per second no dropping down to 1080p no frame interpolation BS and it can actually even be overclocked to 144 Hertz by exposing the option through the on-screen display we were able to get a stable overclock with no problems and the experience is just buttery smooth it's got all the modern g-sync features like support for windowed mode and fast sync vsync and no sync options for if you somehow get FPS higher than the displays maximum refresh rate which would take some serious hardware at 4k residential TV though is something that you won't find on the spec sheet input leg that little delay between moving the mouse and seeing the action on the screen now there are plenty of TVs out there with input lag around the 50 60 or even 70 milliseconds pretty bad since 30 milliseconds is what would be considered noticeable as for this unit honestly it feels like a gaming monitor now we measured lag times of about 30 to 35 milliseconds but keep in mind that our matter of mesh now measures the delay of the entire chain from mouse to PC to game engine to display electronics to pixel response times so the display lag is lower than our measurements show now we do have some tools on the way that should help us get more accurate results and I plan on doing a follow-up video or actually bring one of these puppies home and decide for good what's going to live in my living room but for now let me just say it this way this TV feels responsive AF but everything we've said so far is gonna be the same for all of the Nvidia BFG DS that are coming out what makes HP's offering different to be frank not a lot it's mostly just down to the physical design which my opinion is kind of a mixed bag one of my favorite things about this display is the little light bar that they put by the eye oh isn't that awesome you just wave your hands and it lights up this might seem trivial but it can be really hard to plug in a cable especially with your TV mounted tightly against the wall and like trying to hold your phone as a flashlight in your mouth rarely improves the situation speaking of wall mounting this set is also interesting because it comes with a sound bar and offers two different ways of standing it up the first way is to attach these beefy matte black legs to the TV and then according to the frustratingly brief instructions just kind of slide the sound bar underneath I guess now it's kind of inconsequential but this method felt kind of weird because we weren't actually attaching the sound bar to the TV even though they come together in the box so then if you want to do that then you use method number two where you don't use the legs and instead you mount these brackets to the sound bar first and then everything to the bottom of the display which by the way takes forever because you can't just lay the display down on the table like the instructions say because the bloody sound bar is thicker than the display meaning that you will cross thread the screws which you can barely turn because the allen key doesn't fit anyway look it doesn't matter we got it done but if all that sounded like it's not worth then mission accomplished I guess because don't set it up this way unless you're going to wall mount it because it's tippy to the point of being very dangerous like this thing is puppy crushingly heavy on the subject of wall mounting though that works great and I was very pleased to see a standard face amount with no curvature and no nonsense but don't expect to get that sexy flush mount look because this TV as I alluded to before is really thick and then again the soundbar makes it jut out even more than it absolutely has to yeah you know what the soundbar overall it's just kind of a contentious issue for me so on the one hand it is nice that a $5,000 TV comes with speakers that are at least halfway decent though to be clear not amazing but on the other hand I mean isn't it fair to assume that most people who are in the market for a $5,000 display also have money for decent speakers so I guess that's a tidy transition into the imperium 65 suite points and the first one is a real doozie screen uniformity the edges and particularly the corners have this sepia toned grandma's attic almost dirty look to them when you're looking at white or a bright background now in fairness I wouldn't notice it in a game where I'm typically pretty focused on the crosshair right in front of me but once you see it it's hard to unsee it if you're doing something like web browsing or really anything that's light-colored also there's some pretty noticeable vertical banding going on and these things contributed to while using it just this feeling of having bought an oversized gaming monitor versus a premium television and it gets worst one of the biggest improvements to TVs in the last few years has been there nearly perfect off-axis viewing experience at least to a degree pun intended and the BFG D falls well short of what I would consider to be acceptable for a large living room viewing experience where someone like even on a couch like the one I'm sitting here on right now someone is gonna end up either off on the side or on a beanbag chair over there and they are not gonna have as good an experience both color and contrast are affected but it's the banding and the halos around bright objects because of the local dimming that are truly distracting now they get better if you turn the local dimming off but that's not what I want to do when I'm gaming or watching a movie in HDR on my $5,000 display and finally keep in mind that like anything using DisplayPort 1.4 running 4k at 144 Hertz comes with the trade-off of chromophore 2 to subsampling rather than 4 for 4 which we discussed in more detail in our PG 2 7uq review also the screen takes a good 10 to 12 seconds to turn on whoof and when it comes to HDR support the imperium does not support Dolby vision instead only offering HDR 10 which HP somehow thinks can be appropriately described as one of the most ambitious HDR standards okay in conclusion this display is kick-ass and I really really want to play what I want to play with it and then and then clean it and tuck it in at night and the thing is that I already have it it's here an HP sent it to me to review so then yeah if you're a billionaire you should go get one right now for your dedicated gaming salon but I just have a harder time recommending this to anyone for whom $5,000 is a stretch and here are the reasons number one while I've been referring to it as a TV it isn't strictly speaking a TV it's actually missing some TV features like for example a TV tuner I don't personally consider that a big deal because I don't remember when the last time anyone used their TVs onboard tuner was but it's an important enough a distinction that HP sent us an irate email because we kept calling it a TV and they were like no it's a display so fine I'm mentioning it there you go - it's really tough to push Triple A games past about 70 FPS at 4k and the thing is if you're not going to game at either 4k or 120 Hertz or more specifically both of them then you might as well save yourself some cash with a free sync 120 Hertz 1080p TV then perhaps most importantly three within the next year we're gonna see a lot of the gaming features that make the imperium so great start to appear in mainstream TVs since with HDMI 2.1 are due out this year that means 4k 120 Hertz and again with free sync support so then as long as they have low input lag and a fair number of TVs out there do now they'll probably offer up a very similar gaming experience compared to the BFG D but they could be as much as a few thousand dollars cheaper so this was an amazing product concept that addressed a huge gap in the market when Nvidia in Vail did at CES 2018 now it is a bit of a tougher sell do you ever wonder what your car is trying to tell you when the check engine light turns on well an obd2 scanner can help but it can be complicated to use as it can produce hard to decipher codes well fixed offers you a better solution overall with its included obd2 sensor and smartphone app for Android or iOS devices with their solution you can find out what the specific code is trying to tell you the consequences if you ignore the problem when you do for maintenance the estimated cost of repair and more it's extremely easy to use and is helpful no matter what your level of vehicle knowledge is so use offer code LTTE to save 10% at fixed app.com slash buy we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do 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