Gadgetory

this is the Acer predator x34 it's a 34 inch 21 by 9 ultra wide screen IPS curved monitor with g-sync variable refresh rate technology from Nvidia built into it it can also be overclocked up to 100 Hertz refresh rate many people myself included have been waiting for this confluence of features in a display but is the $1,300 MSRP too much to ask for what Linus has already called the best gaming experience you could put on your desk granite II says a lot but let's find out mass drop has a drop going on right now for the Ergo tech freedom arm it's a desk mounted articulating monitor arm that supports up to 27 inch displays allowing you full control over your monitors position while using almost no desk space as long as you got a hundred by hundred or 75 by 75 bays amount click the sponsor link in the video's description down below or go to dr o PS slash paul's hardware to find out more I'm also going to link Dimitri's ergo tech freedom arm review video on hardware connects down there because he did a really great job reviewing it once again that's dr o dot PS / paul's hardware and a big thank you to mass drop for supporting my channel back to the Acer predator x 34 tho which has actually been available in limited quantities for about a month or so now although I have been told that there will be a wider release with more retail units available around December 12th this afforded me the opportunity to go over some of the other reviews that are out there before I did my review including Linus's on - tech tips as well as J's - cents and joker productions as they all managed to get their hands on a Predator X 30 for links to all three of those videos are also down in the description and while you're down in that area don't neglect to that like button it gets so lonesome sometimes one final note before we get into the meat of this video and the interest of full disclosure is that this monitor was provided to me by Nvidia for this review I am of course extremely thankful to them for that but at the same time I promise all of you that this fact will not affect my opinions or how closely I scrutinize the predator X 34 at first glance the x 34 definitely has that edgy look that manufacturers seem to associate with PC gaming which I guess must work because they keep doing it Acer keeps things pretty tasteful though in my opinion with a couple dark red color accents on the logo and the stand being the blingiest thing on there at second glance though you will find that there is also this under glow light when you turn it on which is also blingy but also pretty cool it can do five different colors red green blue a yellow orange or goldish color and white it's very nice again but I would love to see full RGB support added maybe in a future firmware update the stand itself is made of metal steel actually and it has a very helpful handle up at the top cable management hold down at the bottom with the red exit and very wide twenty feet that do take up a lot of desk space but it makes up for that by being a very solid stand with a good amount of height control as well as tilts to swivel you simply lift and move the whole stand which is works but it's not very convenient and for the first time ever I'm able to say when I'm looking at a monitor stand that you don't need pivot it's just not needed setting this thing up vertically would pretty much be pretty silly anyway the back of this monitor is black glossy plastic which should never be used on anything but at least I don't have to look at it since it's going to be the part that faces the wall a 100 by 100 base amount is back there good work acer on that and for the pluggy area there's your AC power plug Kensington lock headphone jack which is not really conveniently located but it does give you an option for audio aside from the built-in speakers which are seven watts and ok for monitor speakers if that means anything there's a 4 port USB 3.0 hub back here too which is nice to have I guess again it's not really conveniently located some of you might like it for routing a keyboard and mouse through but given the choice between that USB 3.0 hub and a lower price on the monitor I would have gone for the lower price for sure finally for inputs there is a familiar and comforting full-size DisplayPort 1.2 connector and an HDMI port which I just assumed would be HDMI 2.0 but I was actually kind of disappointed to learn as only one point 4 you can still get the full resolution with HDMI 1.4 but you're limited to 50 Hertz refresh rate or 60 Hertz if you overclock it a little bit it's nice to have that as a second input but I just would not use it for gaming the screen is 34 inches diagonal with a matte finish 21 by 9 aspect ratio and 34 40 by 1440 resolution that's four point nine five million pixels for those of you who doing math so you're gonna need a $500 plus graphics card to get reasonable frame rates while gaming on this monitor presumably if you're willing to spend 1,300 on this monitor then you're going to be ok with that but it is still a bit less taxing than 4k fortunately which is about 8.3 million pixels for comparison I would also have to assume that you'd be getting or already have an Nvidia graphics card like a nine eighty or ninety Ti to go with this because this monitor has g-sync which is mat matches the FPS output of your graphics card with the monitors refresh rate makes everything really smooth and it only works with NVIDIA GPUs if you're going for an AMD card well there is the Acer XR 3 4 1 CK which is nearly identical to the predator X 34 except it doesn't have a cool predator name it tops out at 75 Hertz instead of a hundred and it features free sync support instead of g-sync so it works with AMD it can be found for less money though about $1,100 as of the filming of this video 200 bucks more for this one maybe for maybe they've been the panels and the hundred Hertz panels you know they value more I don't know if that's my guess now I'm not going to argue the finer points of free sync versus G sync in this video but I will say that in either case once your eyes have tasted the sweet nectar of variable refresh rate technology no other drink will ever save their thirst the bezel is very thin but the display is inset just a bit I'm actually pretty used to this with monitors by now they've been doing it for several years with all brands it seems it is shown pretty clearly in a search product photos where the screen actually ends in the bezel begins but just an FYI for anyone who is really expecting an edge-to-edge screen on this one it's it's not that finally you've got the curve it is less curved than some other monitors I've seen out there but actually I think it's pretty ideal and this is coming from someone who really doesn't like curved televisions depending on how close you sit to them the far corners of ultra wide monitors in particular can start to taper away at the edges of your field of view more significantly than a 16 by 9 screen like a 1080 or 4k the x34 s-curve compensates for that tapering without being noticeable when you're sitting at a comfortable distance and I just liked it I thought it worked well it wasn't a distraction for me and lastly there is a blue light action mode that you can enable called a sir I protect that is all for these specs and features of the predator x34 though let's actually put it through some tests and real-world usage so the first thing I wanted to do was go ahead and enable that hundred Hertz mode the monitor actually ships at sixty Hertz and overclocking it to 100 Hertz is something that you do via the on-screen display you enable that mode the monitor does a quick reset and then you can go into your Windows display settings and turn up the hundred Hertz mode using the blur Busters website you can go ahead and check and make sure that you're actually achieving hundred Hertz fortunately my monitor was able to hit that just fine and I have had no issues running at this refresh rate ever since I enabled it next up I wanted to look at the color range as well as banding and backlight bleed this is a little bit subjective because I don't necessarily have the color calibration tools to go on top of the monitor to get proper readings but I can tell you that this will achieve 100% of the srgb gama which is very nice that's thanks to it being an IPS monitor with excellent color depth fortunately i also had no color banding across mine which is another issue that came up on some of the forums the transition between colors appeared nice and smooth to me i do have a bit of black backlight bleed and inconsistency though it's along the top right and the top left of the monitor when i'm looking directly at a black screen and this is an issue that's been reported with quite a few different monitors i've definitely seen worse but i've definitely seen better when it comes to backlight bleed as well and this being a very expensive monitor i was a little bit disappointed with that fortunately it's really not noticeable except when you're looking at a very black screen and as i was playing through games and not concentrating and looking for that it never came up with something that was strongly noticeable i had to play some games of course this is where the monitor really shines it is a gaming monitor with gsync and especially especially if the game actually supports 21 by 9 but not all games do grand theft auto 5 is one that i've probably spent the most amount of time playing on the smarter just because it supports it pretty natively i didn't really have any issues the UI is shrunk down a little bit in still in sixteen by nine mode mode but it was just fine another game that I got recently that is really excited about a Starcraft for PvP purposes that's limited to 16 by 9 so you are going to be hit and miss as you're looking for games to play some games that are sixteen by nine still going to run but you're just going to be looking at black bars on either edge of the screen or you're going to have to go in and fiddle with some ini settings or something like that to get it to actually run at 21 by 9 when 21 by 9 is supported combining that with g-sync as well as the IPS colored apps here leads to just an amazing fabulous and wonderful gaming experience that point I would like to drive home because I know I've been trying to like show you guys all of the potential negatives with this monitor for anyone who's really considering dropping that 13 Hendo on it but I got to come back to that over and over again the gaming experience on this when everything's working right is absolutely amazing I also had the chance to use this monitor for some streaming so gaming and streaming at the same time one thing that I will say is that when you're gaming at 21 by 9 I used OBS to just capture the 60 M by 9 portion of the screen for streaming that worked just fine that was using a secondary monitor if I was using just a single monitor and I was stuck with a 16 by 9 game but I would actually do is play it in windowed mode so you still have some screen real estate on either side and my idea was to pull up maybe your twitch chat or maybe like your twitch or your youtube UI have that off to the side so you can kind of keep an eye on on the same screen while you're gaming it's a good use of the space when you can't use it otherwise for non gaming scenarios such as photo and video editing the color depth is also fabulous to have don't roll out movie watching as well though the ultra wide screen is much more akin to the letterbox aspect ratio that you get when you're watching films in the theater just bear in mind that most movies that you can get via blu-ray or DVD are 16 by 9 aspect ratio so you're going to need to look for your own source material and you're probably going to need to look for a software playback player such as VLC that can handle removing black bars cropping and adjusting aspect ratio and finally I tried to get some actual work done by firing up Adobe Premiere and checking out video editing on this monitor this is a serious contender for ultra wide vs. say if you're using two or three monitors in a multi monitor configuration right now which is really great for productivity I personally still like multi monitor but J for example has ditched his three monitor maybe even four monitors set up just for this single display yeah it's kind of up to your preference but I will say that being able to put stuff side-by-side on here to look at you know webpage on one side while doing something else on the other whatever you want to do for your multitasking is fantastic and it is a serious contender and an option for those of you who have been working with multiple monitors now before I move into the conclusion parts I need to make note of what seems to be some ongoing quality control issues with the Acer predator X 34 I only experience these when it comes to the backlight bleed which was again a little bit disappointing but not a game breaker for me others have had not as good of experiences though and I found this via a review posted on new egg like literally yesterday ongoing complaints on the Acer forums as well as some of the other review sites that I looked up that I don't recall right now but those are linked in the description down below if you want to check them out I found a range of issues that had been reported some of them were minor some of them were really issues that I personally would not live with if I had just dropped $1300 on a monitor fortunately acer is very active on their own forums and for people who are experiencing game-breaking issues they are reaching out to them to work with the replacements and that kind of thing under the monitors warranty which is three years from Acer so by that in mind some folks were having issues with color banding across the monitor especially when they're watching looking at some of those gradients there were some issues with some of the build quality as far as the construction down here along the edges I also saw some people complaining of electrical noise or coil whine although I have experienced none of that here again the backlight bleed issue was the only thing that really popped up is something that I was a less than happy with bearing all that in mind though let's move to the conclusion I'm gonna do a cons list and a pros list and let's I'd like to remove the band-aid first let's start off with cons and the first obvious con is oh my god the price there are definitely other cost-effective 21 by 9 options out there other than the ACR predator ex 34 not all of them have the exact list of features that this one has so I think that's why a sir feels like they can price it at the price point that they have and just to point this out these are sold out everywhere so clearly people are buying them even at that price so we'll leave it at that next up was the overclock speed I didn't quite understand why they didn't just ship it at 100 Hertz rather than starting it at 60 and having you overclock it yourself maybe that has something to do with warranty issues or anything Jay mentioned this one as well but I already kind of noted my theory that they're bending the panels and they're using the ones that don't overclock as much for the freesync version and the better overclocking ones for this one just a theory but wanted to throw it out there 21 by 9 game support is definitely a con just in that not all games support it and some games are just stuck other games you have to go through some leaping through some hoops in order to get that to work I would say it would be nice to have the HDMI 2.0 on there to have that versatility and flexibility for multiple display connections Jerry I know you've been having some issues with those two display connection options recently although not with this particular monitor the on screen display menu is pretty bad and just confusing it's hard to navigate around once you figure it out it's it's usable but it's still pretty bad the black glossy plastic on the black back I don't like it I'm glad I don't have to look at it I would love to see more colors on the under glow light and then the aforementioned quality control issues which again are hit and miss let's move on to pros though because there's definitely some really big pros even though I think the actual list is shorter so first off just 34 inch 21 by 9 34 40 by 1440 is pretty fricking amazing it's just a beautiful balance between the size of the display and the resolution even simple things like the icons being like the reasonable size and that kind of thing 100 Hertz g-sync is also pretty amazing combined with those first things that I mentioned I have not done extensive side-by-side testing of like 100 Hertz versus 144 or something like that but just subjectively I do not notice much of a difference when you're especially with G sync between 100 and 144 and I would say that I will take a hundred Hertz IPS over 144 Hertz TN any day but that's because I like color depth also the curve I think they did a really good job with it's a pretty ideal level of curvature without being overdone it is definitely more appropriate to curve a 21 by 9 monitor than a 16 by 9 the matte finish is beautiful I would have hated a glossy finish on this it's still somewhat glossy but it's mostly matte and then of course you got that IPS color gamut hundred-percent srgb wide viewing angles which is also nice for a curved monitor and and yeah that's that's a pretty good list of pros I think and let's finish off with some final closing thoughts first off the price yes it is very high but I will point out that there is a market for these because they're sold out everywhere I don't know take that for what it is quality control issues definitely suck and it was disappointing to read some of those as I was doing research for my review on this monitor fortunately I didn't hit those too bad but I would definitely recommend if you're gonna buy this buy from somewhere that has a good return policy if they charge a restocking fee when you return it you might want to reconsider because that's a 15% of 1300 is pretty expensive some places like Newegg you can call in and like talk them into waiving it anyway I'll leave that in your hands finally you probably want to know if I would buy this myself for $1,300 since Aaron mentioned that this came over from Nvidia I would say no but I'm not their target market I don't typically spend this much money on a display for example last display I bought that was a big investment for me was the 700 ish dollars that I spent on my yarmulke see leonidas which was two and a half years ago but if you're seriously thinking about this monitor and you have the money and the cons don't deter you you're in for an amazing amazing gaming experience I have to keep referencing that and hopefully now you will know what to expect when it comes to the pros and the cons anyway guys if you enjoyed this video don't forget to hit that like button use my amazon link if you're doing any shopping for gifts or whatever else right now you can feel free to visit my store at store all-star Burnett where you can support me by picking up a shirt like this one or I also have mugs and pint glasses over there subscribe to the channel for more tech videos and as always thank you for watching you