Gadgetory

excellent everyone welcome back to Pauls hardware thanks for tuning in today I have a review for you guys this is my new monitor this is the yamakasi leonidas 2560 by 1600 monitor all the way from Korea I've had it for about a week now so I'm going to be doing an unboxing as well as a review if you're wondering how I'm going to be doing an unboxing I'm gonna do it by traveling back in time actually I'm just gonna reference the video I shot last week when I unboxed it so to start off here's a look at the retail box in the condition that it arrived to me and as you can see it's packed very very well they've done actual bubble wrap over the entire outside of the retail box and I'm going to give it a quick a quick size comparison here with nori she's not really into it okay maybe we'll check him later but as you can see totally fine as far as shipping it arrived to me in about like four days I think after I placed the order and that was during Korean New Year which was pretty impressive as you can see just a little bit of scuffing on the side but again with that bubble wrap that the box itself was almost perfect there was one little thing in it that I think you'll see here in a second hey there it is right there little thing in the box again nothing to worry about the monitor itself is totally fine so as far as shipping goes totally perfect also as far as duties or imports or anything like that I'm in the US in California and I had to pay nothing extra anyway there's the box itself bubble wrap off as you can see I'm Ecosse 300 leonidas it's actually pretty hilarious the amount of copyright infringement going on here with the 300 team I'm sure if they actually imported it they might actually have to change the name of the monitor maybe or at least the box I have no idea anyway is just some looks at the outside of the box this is made by wheat tech or Y Tech here's another here's another dog size comparison see I know you anyway the here is the Box being opened of course inside we have a baggie with all the accessories we also have the monitor itself really nice closed cell foam packaging another extra piece below there to protect the screen just in case anything did punch through as you can see it's really well protected so I wasn't really concerned at all as far as the monitor here's a look at the inner packaging of course and that's pretty much it it was in beautiful condition I did pay for the pixel-perfect version so there was no dead pixels I should also mention here is the accessories it comes with a dual link DVI cable and bear mind you need dual link DVI in order to use this monitor you also get the AC adapter and it's got kind of some funny wording on there which I thought was was pretty cute but pretty standard power brick there were some complaints about this getting too warm in my experience it hasn't I mean it does get warm but nothing more than a power brick I've seen as you can see standard AC adapter type cable 110 volt is acceptable so this is a cable that comes with which I think is Korean or your I honestly have no idea what kind of plug that is I'm sorry but you don't need to use that it comes with an AC adapter if you're in the u.s. to go with the u.s. standard sized plug that you can pop on but I just used an existing computer cable I had and that works just fine here's the user's manual it's all in Korean they'll send you an English version if you really want an English version via PDF and they eat in the mail and then here's an extra English bit that was thrown in I believe this was actually thrown in by the eBay shipper green some that I got from but as you can see some troubleshooting as well as installing the power cable and whatnot so you should pretty much be able to get set up and good to go without any difficulties so here's a look at the monitor itself and as you can see well it's pretty nice and I wanted to point out a couple different things specifically one of the reasons one of the things I wanted to point out is why why I decided to get this monitor basically right now if you want a 2560 by 1600 monitor your options are to pay a little over a thousand dollars for one of the ones that's currently available retail in the US and there's quite a few options out there and they're very nice as you would expect if you're paying a thousand bucks for a monitor there I've tried several of those but I wanted 2560 by 1600 and there's also the yama kasi cat leap that's very popular out there that's 2560 by 1440 I wanted the high resolution because I've been using that but I've been running benchmarks and I've really kind of fallen in love with that resolution it just looks so nice I miss the vertical space I am just trans yeah I miss the vertical space when it's not there anymore and I wanted something that I could use at home especially since I've been doing more benchmarking and stuff at home so looking online is a there's a yama kasi sparta you might see that's available and you can actually get that for about five to six hundred bucks depending on where you look I didn't go with the Sparta for a couple reasons one is that the Sparta has a different housing than this and if you can see here this is a really nice all-metal brush metal housing that's kind of grey on the back so you guys can see from the side here that's about the width of it I also wanted a slightly better stand and this does have definitely a much better stand than the cat leap or the Sparta as you can see it's got height tilt and swivel so you can swivel the monitor the stand is actually a little bit on the flimsy side for my taste but I mean it's hard to complain I guess too much because honestly once I get a monitor set up where I want it to go that's usually about the last time I move it unless I do a video on it like this one but it comes with a little pin in the bottom which are totally misplaced this little pin here on the bottom it just screws in right down here when it's in its lowest position so you can lock it in place there other than that once you remove that you pretty much have free range to do the height that's about as high as it goes about as little as it goes on that stand the stand is pretty basic it is black it's got a bit of gloss on the bottom that's already started to get a little scuffed up as is glossy monitors Dan's tend to do but the other thing I like about this monitor so far is the temperature actually because I do have an thirty 2560 by 1600 at work that's in HP's er 30 W I believe and one thing I've noticed is is what the backlight it gets really warm and it starts to just put off all this heat this monitor does get warm but I don't know whether it's the metal housing or just the components inside maybe a little bit newer maybe a little bit more efficient no idea but barely coming off of the back of this you can tell if you put your hand right up there with it with the HP sometimes I'm sitting in front of it actually notice but this one that's been totally fine it tilts as you can see it tilts back pretty far I bet at all if that's your thing and then here as you can see we have our controls controls are pretty basic you get power and then there's a plus and minus and I all have practically no idea what the plus and minus do all right guys here's another shot with the monitor actually on this is just running the Unigine valley benchmark and I know this is really subjective because you are watching this on your monitor and you can't necessarily see the quality of this monitor but I can tell you this is a it looks beautiful oh I can also hear it oh that's because I have I have headphones plugged in I forgot I had headphones plugged in and I hadn't been listening to the audio on this benchmark yet but again I got the pixel-perfect version so that is one issue if you are looking on the eBay sales for this particular monitor actually most of the monitors they have a policy for the center you can have one dead pixel and then up to four more in the areas around the outer edges and pretty much I just I didn't want to have that one or two or three dead pixels that I had could do nothing about I really wanted it to be a perfect panel so I paid about an extra 80 or hundred bucks for the perfect pixel version so this was ended up being about 750 bucks for 650 you can get this not pixel perfect if you're willing to take a little bit of a risk and I read a lot of people get them and theirs they're just fine they're just as fine as the pixel perfect versions and then as I was taught to mention it earlier you also have the Sparta option Sparta has a tempered glass panel on on the front so it's actually a glossy screen I absolutely despise glossy screens so I wanted this one to be the nice matte finish that you can probably see that it is and yeah that pretty much does it so reason with this even though like a good two or three hundred more then I could have gotten the Sparta 4 which is the same 2560 by 1600 and essentially the same panel behind it was I wanted this housing I wanted the matte finish I wanted pixel perfect and the last thing is I wanted to have the input on the back that this one has which is just a single dual link DVI so I'm going to go into that next so here as you can see is our single DVI input also over there on the side you can see the special little AC power adapter input now the reason that I wanted this actually like this with the single DVI input is input lag because when you have multiple inputs there's an actual board in there that can lead to input lag depending on the type of monitor you're using of course so there is the DVI input but one of the big warnings that you'll see if you're looking at this monitor online this one is opposed to the Sparta because the Sparta has multiple inputs is that if you're using the dual link DVI you have to have a dual link DVI connection so they have video cards that they are listing off you basically need dual link DVI 2560 by 100 1600 resolution capable but what if you have a monitor that has other what if you have a video card or a video source that has other outputs so I want to do a quick test here I brought along some adapters so this is a DisplayPort to dual link DVI and this is an active adapter so I'll be testing this one out I also have an HDMI to dual link DVI I believe it's dual link it's got all the pins in there although HDMI technically unless you have the really newest HDMI spec can't do this resolution and then finally I have standard sized DisplayPort to D AB dual link DVI and this is actually kind of really chintzy little adapter then I'm not even sure if it works but I'm just going to try it out because this is a passive an adapter as opposed to this one which is active so let's see if any of these will give me a signal on this monitor that's a negative native ghostwriting okay test number one with our DisplayPort to DVI passive adapter was an utter failure this is test number two we're going with the HDMI to DVI adapter I've also switched over video cards the first test that's running with an Ares 2 which has a native full sized DisplayPort this is a HS Radeon HD 7970 gigahertz Edition which has an HDMI out and is not looking good so far and I think that's a swing and a miss for the HDMI to DVI adapter so for two so far with our passive adapters here is test number three if I was going to pick a horse for this race this would have been it this is the mini DisplayPort to DVI active adapter let's see if she works Wow well I gotta admit kind of a surprising result guys uh they're not they're not joking around when they say you need a dual link DVI connection and it needs to be native don't plan on using adapters because I've tried at least three different options here all three did not work so again dual link DVI required for this monitor and that wraps it up for this video guys once again this has been my review of the yamakasi Leonidas 2560 by 1600 only available right now on ebay so you got to take a little bit of risk when you're ordering this one but if you go the route that I did I think you'll be very happy once again superb monitor fantastic panel beautiful beautiful color reproduction I only really complained thus far about it has been the stand which is slightly flimsy but honestly really not that big of a deal and then of course again that backlight which is really bright right now the one thing I haven't done yet is do some calibration on it again there's really no controls on the monitor itself so you got to do that from within Windows I'm going to grab a calibration tool that we have work and play around with it and see what kind of results I can get but again that's all for this video if you guys enjoyed please toss a like my way I'd love you if you would subscribe for more tech videos just like this one I'm Paul you're watching Paul's hardware and we'll see you all next time you