Gadgetory

ultra wide monitors this is not the first one I've seen but it is the first I've seen that targets gamers so directly welcome to my video of the LG 34 um 67 fractal design listens and the define are five case was made with feedback from you the community so click my face to learn more about that and give your feedback so let's start by having a look at her physically mmmm if you watched my video on the 34 um 95 just under a year ago you already know pretty much how this story goes the stand is see-through which is neat but it's otherwise subpar since only its tilt and angle can be adjusted without removing and replacing the two screws that let you change the height a grand total of like an inch and there's some unfortunate stuff at the back as well that glossy plastic is going to do what glossy plastic does best although we might have an idea for a solution so make sure that you're subscribed for that video and while the standard vase amount and included sticker to protect the back of your monitor are welcome sites folks who want to wall mount this puppy will need to buy low profile angled connectors for anything but the second HDMI input so the audio passed through HDMI one DVI or DisplayPort ports no USB hub back here something I would have liked to see on such an expensive display as well moving around to the front things get quite a bit better in a hurry the bezel around the mat anti-glare coated 2560 by 1080 75 Hertz IPS panel is super slim and LG's joystick for navigating the on-screen menu is present and what an on-screen menu it is it lacks an sRGB color profile even though 99% srgb coverage is a selling point on the monitors web page for some reason but if you've got a calibration tool the sixaxis color adjustments will let you take care of that easily and just about anything else you can set it to six bit or 8-bit color adjust pixel response times although as usual I found medium was the best compromise and much better than older IPS panels by the way you can tinker with their black stabilizer feature which is similar to Ben Hughes black equalizer in contrast reducing effect that makes it easier to see objects in shadows and games without washing out all of the colors on screen you can use any of the pre-configured gaming modes that monkey around with color gamma and sharpness or you can make your own that you can switch to by pressing up on the joystick twice and then you can enable and disable a couple of LG's other killer features for the 34 um 67 as well the first is Daz or dynamic action sync this one is pretty simple it's designed to reduce display lag or the time between the monitor receiving a frame and displaying it on the screen usually this feature is labeled on TVs as a game mode or similar and results in dramatically worse image quality thanks to less pixel processing but in the case of the 34 um 67 I can't find any reason with my bare eyes to turn it off it looked exactly the same to me and the second killer app compliance with the optional adaptive sync portion of the DisplayPort 1.2 a standard and AMD freesync certification this monitor supports dynamic refresh rate gaming where you're supported system can effectively tell the monitor when to refresh the image eliminating the issues associated with vsync on so that is stuttering in leg and vsync off that tearing effect where there seems to be a horizontal line through the image where there's half of one frame and half of the next one on the screen at the same time there are some caveats here though in addition to a compliant display you'll need a support at AMD dedicated or onboard graphics solution you'll need a display port cable curiously not included in the box and you'll need a free sync compatible driver so I used two beta one provided by AMD for my evaluation of this monitor yes friends Nvidia graphics card owners will not be able to take advantage of the dynamic refresh rate of this monitor unless Nvidia decides to go down the DP one point to a open standard route sometime in the future instead of asking monitor vendors to buy their own g-sync scaler chip something that at this time is quite expensive and only supports DisplayPort input but Nvidia claims will have other advantages down the line we can talk about that when that comes but first let's talk about the usage experience of this monitor I still love ultra wide for productivity but I'm also still not super stoked on 2560 by 1080 that particular use case I found myself frustrated with the number of vertical pixels scrolling a lot the same way that I always was way back in the day of the dinosaurs when sixteen by ten monitors went out of fashion to be replaced by sixteen by nine 1080p monitors and this issue if for me is made worse by the size of this display thanks to its IPS panel contrast color vibrancy and viewing angles are not issues but with pixel density this low even with no scaling text looks abominable and no amount of low blue light reading modes made it feel comfortable for me to use compared to its 34 40 by 1440 brethren also from LG but I understand why LG did it this way they didn't really have a choice from the marketing this is a gaming monitor first and productivity monitor second and 34 40 by 1440 is just about 80 percent more pixels than 2560 by 1080 which might make graphics card companies happy with all the video cards they'll be selling just so folks can play games at native res but might not thrilled gamers too much and in games the pixel density bothers me a lot less I don't find anti-aliasing unnecessary like I did with Dells 5k monitor but four times AAA was a good balance between playability of very demanding games like Crysis 3 at very high settings on an r9 290x and image quality gaming on the screen this size is going to be immersive pretty much no matter how you slice it and thanks to its very low leg solid motion blur performance and 75 Hertz panel that really does make a big difference over 60 by the way the 34 um 67 is a pleasure to game on but hold on a second - you didn't even mention freesync yet you're right I didn't but I will now here in the conclusion in spite of this monitors presence named ease free sync media materials and the prominent logo on the box I didn't find the implementation of free sync to be as useful as it can be in this case but it took me a few hours and a lifeline call to my buddy Ryan shroud from PC perspective to figure out why I was encountering stuttering and tearing with freesync enabled when it was clearly working in amd's windmill demo it's because this monitors adaptive refresh rate window is from 48 Hertz to 75 Hertz only 27 Hertz that means even if you enable free sync with vsync also on the experience is pretty good as long as your frame rates remain pretty high other than the very slight input lag penalty similar to vsync that is caused by capping your framerate like that and with it off so the vsync off you'll actually still get tearing anytime your game runs above 75 fps and there's more bad news - you'll get leg under 48 FPS thanks to LG's selection of 48 Hertz as the low-end cut-off of the adaptive refresh rate window on this monitor but to be clear this is not a knock on free sync there are monitors with much wider like a hundred Hertz Plus windows that go down to 40 Hertz on the spec actually allows for Windows as low as nine Hertz once panel technology improves and it's actually not a condemnation of the 34 um 67 as a gaming monitor either its size IPS panel and ultra wide aspect ratio along with its incredible responsiveness for considering all of those things still make it a totally unique gaming experience it just means that those two technologies didn't complement each other as well as I was really hoping for in this case so this is cool we're giving away 31 month xsplit professional codes all you got to do is enter in the forum thread in the video description and winners will be selected one week from today April the second pretty cool stuff not today April the second on April the second yay anyway if you don't know what xsplit is it's basically a broadcasting software that personally I absolutely love we use it every Friday for our live show it allows us to change scenes it allows us to take a wide variety of different inputs and basically switch them around move people around we can import Skype callers so that we can have people you know joining us for our podcast or video podcast as it were and it's awesome for Game streamers especially when it's paired with xsplit gamecaster so there's broadcaster and game caster so game caster is great for gamers because it allows you to bring up a little overlays you can easily stop and start your stream and all that kind of good stuff one of the coolest things about xsplit is that it is absolutely free for the basic versions all you got to do is head over to xsplit comm / Linus to start streaming and recording in HD today so guys thanks for watching like 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