Gadgetory

so a couple weeks back when everyone was in Taiwan for Computex Kyle tweeted a picture of he and his wife and it was raining and they didn't have umbrellas and I tweeted a snarky response back because they should be very well aware that they need umbrellas in Taiwan in early June because they've been going there for context for like seven plus years I think but then Jay also known as Jay's $0.02 responded to my tweet and said ah I really like the new I don't give a version of Paul and I was like all right that's kind of new but maybe I should go with this let's let's try this new attitude out for a little bit to that end Oh God this is the brand new asus rog swift pg3 5v ultra wide gaming monitor g-sync ultimate support and 200 Hertz for fresh rates it is going to cost a lot about twenty five hundred dollars according to Asus Asus said that they really only sent a couple of these out for review to me and Linus tech tips so just want to point out the by comparison your monitor is horrible I have this and you don't so suck it cooler masters SF series fans feature addressable RGB LEDs and a square design to maximize fan mount coverage and generate high pressure air flow available in standard hundred twenty millimeter size as the SF 120 P as well as the dual fan 240 millimeter option in the SF 240p a RGB cooler master has integrated multiple layers of noise reduction technology and an optimized fan blade design into this series so click the sponsor link in the description to learn more that's a heavy monitor choose this is an ultra-wide monitor very popular for gaming the ultra wide monitors are I I really like this ultra wide size the form factor just because it gives you more wrap around having a slight curvature is also nice this has 1800 our curvature it's 35 inches measured diagonally from corner to corner to corner the resolution is 34 40 by 1440 which is a good resolution that is significantly better than 1080 or ultra wide 1080 but still fewer pixels in 4k which means you can get higher frame rates or more FPS with less power from your graphics card that's sort of a general description but it does have external RGB lighting one in this display right here and then it's got the downward projecting RGB ROG logo both of those can be controlled via the Asus or a software also one more our og logo right there on top of the stand if you're special like me and you have this monitor you also get a big old box of accessories starting with a better ring or no this is actually an additional panel you can put on the back after you get everything wired up with your cables you want it to look pretty so that is a cover I'll show you how that goes on in just a second we have some paperwork also to confirm how awesome I am for having this monitor I am an Asus VIP this is just to notify me of that and then we have also I'm part of the elite Republic of gamers community now which has tons of perks as outlined in this this also has a sort of a QuickStart guide as well safety info you get this squishy pouch stash bag for storing your mustaches also in that is these ROG logos and I've never actually had an asus rog monitored that has a downward firing thing but it doesn't come pre-installed so that pops on the back and then the light shines through this so you can swap that out for a different RG pattern if you want to or they provide you with some blanks so you can make your own also included in the Box is this color calibration testing report because this monitor actually is really good color reproduction it has 1000 nits of brightness 90% of the DCI p3 color space can be represented so that's the 10 billion colors 10 big gamut although it can accept a 12 bit input signal and then Delta e less than two color calibrations so they're basically guaranteeing a very high level of color accuracy out of the box because they individually calibrates each monitor before chips from the factory I tend to be critical of monitors when it comes to stands because I think a monitor should either ship with a good stand or have a vase amount ideally it should have both this monitor does have both which includes a nice stand but also these stand offs because it does have a standard base amount but it's recessed so you'll need these standoffs in order to use that standard base amount so if you do decide to put it on a swing arm or wall-mounted or something like that you do have support for that good job' suits including those in the package it does have a fairly large external power brick and in fact this monitor has three internal cooling fans as well that Asus has done some work to make sure that they ramp up and down at the right speed to make sure things are staying cool while also minimizing the amounts of noise that's generated big power brick so you're going to need to find a spot for that the plus side of having an external power brick is that if it fails or something like that you can replace it without having to replace the entire monitor and they do include both sides of cables so that's nice too and lastly we have three included cables an HDMI and it can do up to 100 Hertz at full resolution via HDMI display port where you can get up to 200 Hertz so if you're gaming you want to be connecting via DisplayPort ideally to an Nvidia graphics card and then finally there is a USB extension because it does have an integrated USB hub not just a USB hub though they have also integrated a sound card basically into this monitor it has an integrated ESS ESS on fire that supports audio output at up to 24 bit 192 kilohertz which means that yes you can plug into the 3.5 millimeter jack on this monitor and still get good sound and it also allows you the convenience of connecting up via HDMI and just having the single cable for sound just bear in mind if you're doing HDMI and going through the headphone jack you're limited to 16 bit 48 kilohertz if you really want to fully make use of the integrated sound card you want to connect via USB I've laid the monitor flat here just for a second so we can handle a few things there's a Kensington lock I always like to point that out and back here we have some designs you know apart from the lighting which I'm gonna plug in in just a second and show you I mean this really cool aesthetic design on the back of your monitor and some of you might be thinking and it's setec design on the back of the monitor I'm never going to see that but those of us who own a monitor of this caliber and quality know that it really is what sets it apart from the rest that's available and you know just gives you that feeling of superiority back here you have the IO there's an HDMI and a DisplayPort out and then there's the USB input there's a couple USB 3.0 ports back there it's pretty much all apart from connecting up power as well and then you can route those cables back through the stand where there's a little port that helps keep the cable management nice and tidy speaking of the stand down here at the bottom we haven't installed the ROG logo we've just going with the default one for now and just been routing the cables up so that we can plug stuff in and do some testing with this monitor also wanted to show you guys how this panel pops on just like this and look look how much cleaner that is all of you guys probably don't have this feature on your monitor which is why this one is better I actually can put the downward firing logo on while you're installing the monitors base and stand which is what you're supposed to do but also I want to point out there's a little cap over the lens here that you're supposed to remove somehow somehow oh there we go now normally I don't spend too much time on gratuitous sexy b-roll footage in my videos but for this monitor hey why not make an exception so a few things you might notice physically about this monitor one is that asus is still calling monitors bezel lists even though it has clearly about a quarter-inch bezel around the entire outside I guess that's a trend that's just going to continue but I just want to point out this is not an edge-to-edge screen and I don't know why they're trying to tell you that it is the stand apart from having those fancy chrome accents as well as the downer firing LED does have height tilt and swivel adjustment which is just about all you can expect for an ultra wide and I will also note that it doesn't cost a thousand dollars extra the only other things physically about this monitor I wanted to point out it that the controls are sort of tucked around the back right side and there is a joystick to allow you to navigate through them which is pretty convenient they're pretty easy to get to and not too difficult to navigate through the menus with and I wanted to point out that for all the extra effort that Asus went through to give you a better sound solution for this and I have been testing it and it does sound better I can't really show you guys that because you're listening to it through your own sound devices but it does sound better though if you plug in via a USB and go via the included ESS amplifier but if they really wanted people to use this they should have repositioned the headphone jack it's still positioned back there all of the video in and outs which means that if you put this cover on you can't get at it moving on to some testing though and for the sake of comparison I've set this up side by side with my lg monitor which is the 3/4 GK 950 F which is 144 Hertz monitor it's 34 inches rather than 35 inches so just slightly smaller but the same resolution 34 40 by 1440 it supports free sync - as well as HDR 400 so the lesser variant of the HDR 1000 that the asus monitor supports when it comes to setting up the PG 3 5 V it will run at 180 Hertz max out of the box so you do need to jump into the menu and go to the overclocking function which is the first thing on there to turn on 200 Hertz mode to get full range of 1 to 200 Hertz G seek support which is a nice feature especially if you dip into the really low frame rates at sports down to 1 Hertz for fresh which would be awkward but they're good to have the full spectrum supported there it does also have a blue light filter built-in levels 0 through 4 supported and then there's some game visual modes that you can access if you're not in HDR mode racing mode will get you the fastest response time I did most of my testing and srgb except for my click to response time that I'll get to in just a second also if you go in the image menu you'll find an overdrive function and one of the things that I noticed as I was doing side by side testing was some more noticeable ghosting with the asus monitor as compared to the LG they're supposed to have similar pixel response times in the 4 millisecond range but i did notice when the asus monitor had overdrive off there was noticeable ghosting you can't turn an overdrive mode to normal or extreme normal did reduce that ghosting a bit so that's probably the mode of playing we went to extreme though it went a little bit too far and it caused a corona effect which is kind of inverse ghosting that hopefully you can see in some of these slow-mo frames all that is to say though from a direct panel to panel comparison there's definitely a little bit worse ghosting on the asus then on the LG which is kind of disappointing because LG monitor is currently available for a little bit less than $1,000 which is a lot less to the about $2,500 expected retail price of the Asus another function available in the menus is the variable backlight it has a 512 zone backlight with full area local dimming since it's a VA panel that it's using it does still need a backlight and 512 zone is just about as good as you can get unless you go all the way to oh le d that said you can adjust how fast or slow the zones actually light up or dim down but I did notice some haloing happening which is one of the negative sides of a full area local dimming back light like this one and that just means that when there's extremely high contrast you might see certain areas of the screen light up because you can actually see the backlight lighting up so if you're looking at a very dark image with small points of light you might see halos around them I've run it through the LG chess 4k demo which is supposed to call this out a little bit more fortunately when watching video or playing games this effect is really not very noticeable I had to sort of tease it out by setting the background to gray and moving a window around it here you can really see when the back lights light up and dim but again in practice it wasn't that noticeable just something that some people who are prettier about their displays especially if you're spending 2500 bucks on one might notice just rounding out going down the menu there's a game plus menu that allows you to put a crosshair or a timer or FPS counter overlay on the screen asus has been doing that for a while it is available in this monitor too and then if you go into the system setup menu can go to the light in motion or a sync or or RGB functions and those are what's going to allow you to manually control the LEDs that's on the back of the monitor the downward firing LED that lights up the desk underneath the monitors stand and you can actually set those to specific colors there's a few basic effects that are available in there or you can just switch over to aura sync mode in which case if you have the USB plugged in you can use the aura sync software to synchronize everything up with your computer and the RGB LEDs that you no doubt have installed there last thing I wanted to mention here is it's in the setup menu you can go and tell it whether it's going to use the HDMI pass-through with the integrated audio just as is which will get you lower sound quality or you can plug in via the USB have it recognize it as a sound device on your system that's what you're already using it that way I would recommend that if you are planning on passing your audio through the monitor because it definitely does improve the audio quality again it's subjective I can't really show you guys that because it's just me listening to the headphones but yes that is definitely the way to go speaking of tests that I can't really show you because you guys may or may not be actually using HDR monitors and this isn't going to be an HDR video anyway is display HDR 1000 support from everyone who I've spoken to and I have very limited experience with HDR getting the brightness up as high as you can is very important and a thousand nits of brightness is the on the high end I'm actually very high-end comes to a monitor most monitors you'll see you're down in the 250 to 400 range that is what allows it to hit that display HDR 1000 spec that's also what gives it the g-sync ultimate support because that's like g-sync with extra sauce which is basically HDR support in HDR 1000 and here's where I definitely noticed an improvement with the Asus monitor compared to the LG and that simply due to the high dynamic range being worse on the LG I noticed a lot more colors being washed out as using Austin Evans iPhone 10 video which is available in HD are the 4k on YouTube and you can just see a lot more normal gradation of tones on the Asus monitor as I noticed things were a lot more washed out on the LG so when it comes to HDR support I think that's definitely an area where this monitor shines I'm still developing my monitor testing techniques but I wanted to do a click to response time test using a Heim framerate recording with the camera that I have which can go up to 180 frames per second so basically in my admittedly limited test the asus monitor took about 23 frames to actually show a response versus the LG which took about 14 frames to show a response that's out of 180 frames total it was recording per second so according to my calculations that's about 80 milliseconds of input lag on the LG and about 120 125 milliseconds of input lag on the Asus so the LG was a little bit faster in that respect as well finally we just did some live gameplay testing I had Joe test out Apex legends because you can actually play it an ultra wide although it is stretched at the edges but he noticed a lot more smoothness even compared going from the 144 Hertz from the LG to the 200 Hertz for the asus and he was gonna win both matches he won the match he played originally on the LG monitor and that just goes to show more frames obviously makes you a better gamer and then I think he was gonna win the one he was playing on the asus monitor - except for the system froze up i have no idea if that was because i have the new windows 1903 update or something to do with HDR or the dual monitors or if arctic panther just decided to take a crap on me i'm not sure but it's definitely worth repeating that playing 200 Hertz g sync is a buttery smooth gaming experience especially for an FPS game i did a little bit of gaming too i played some overwatch which is kind of silly because it doesn't support ultra wide unless you crop it which is you I want to do anyway but still even if you're playing a sixteen by nine game you're still taking advantage of the high refresh rate and everything so I would say still worth playing although Metro is probably made a little bit more sense because I could actually play that in ultra-wide let me try to sum up this video for you guys if I can this monitor is absolutely awesome for gaming and hopefully some of my testing has brought that across to you is it worth the price that Asus is charging for it right at launch of about twenty five hundred dollars u.s. probably not for most people just because that's very expensive that's a lot more than most people I think spend on a monitor but I think there's a niche of people with the money who have been waiting for this confluence of features that being the form factor ultra wide the size the resolution the super high refresh rate at 200 Hertz with g-sync as well as the color act accuracy which I don't think we've really seen in a monitor of this caliber I think what Asus maybe should have done is cut down on some of the extra features of this monitor like all the RGB stuff on the back the housing that stuff looks really cool let's be honest it makes me feel happy a little bit but ultimately in most situations it's gonna be facing the wall like it is right here and you're never gonna see it again same goes for having a artfully design stand with the downward firing led logo I mean sure monitor stands are very expensive these days and can sell for upwards of a thousand dollars or so I've heard but I feel like cases could have cut back on some of that stuff maybe not worried about the integrated audio and cut down on the price and made it a little bit more reasonable for some people and who knows maybe Asus will make a slightly cut-down version of this monitor that uses the panel technology but remove some of that other stuff and makes the price a little bit less who knows my negatives for this monitor are definitely going to be the haloing that's happening from the backlight the ghosting that's happening it was a really bad ghost thing I want to point that out it's only good bad ghosting cuz I'm comparing it to this lg monitor as really next to no ghosting and then I think the input lag could be improved a bit as well but overall the gaming experience on this monitor is absolutely amazing same goes for media playback so if you guys are looking for a monitor and you've got the money definitely consider this one but I would keep an eye out as well for alternatives that might have a very similar set of features as this asus monitor that maybe aren't the over-the-top super premium urged with lots of RGB LEDs and everything that tends to cost a little bit more I'm hoping that this technology will be more accessible for more people in the future and that way I won't have to make videos like this where I simply gloat and point out to you guys that I have this and you don't for now yes that's all I can do so guys if you enjoyed this video please hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed my slightly different take on an approach then you know let me know that in the comments section below as well and we'll see you guys in the next video