The 4K Experience: A Game-Changer for PC Gamers and Productivity Enthusiasts

For years, we've been waiting for PC monitors to catch up with the latest advancements in display technology. Finally, it's here - the 4K experience is a reality, and it's absolutely unreal when done right. The latest crop of 4K monitors promises improved pixel density, beautiful colors, and respectable processing leg. In this article, we'll delve into the world of 4K displays and explore what makes them so special.

One of the most significant advantages of a 4K monitor is its razor-sharp display. With 3840 x 2160 resolution, it's like looking at four 16-inch 1080p monitors side-by-side and stacked together with no bezels between them. This means that text, icons, and other graphical elements will be incredibly crisp and clear, making it easier to read and navigate. The benefits are most noticeable in productivity applications such as Windows Explorer, where text will retain its sharpness even at high scaling levels.

However, the 4K experience is not without its challenges. One of the major hurdles is scaling. While operating systems like Android and iOS handle scaling relatively well, Windows still lags behind. This means that if you leave the scale at 100 percent, third-party applications will suffer from poor text rendering, making it difficult to read. Scaling up to 150 or higher can exacerbate this issue, with text appearing fuzzy and unprofessional. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated problem; other graphical elements may also behave strangely at high resolutions.

Another issue that arises when working on a 4K display is website design. Sites designed for fixed-width layouts will simply float in the middle of your screen, creating a jarring visual experience. Even dynamic websites can struggle to adapt to the increased resolution, with elements stretched out to the edges or broken out into awkward shapes. One solution to this problem is to split your monitor into virtual smaller sections using third-party software, but this requires some tinkering to get right.

Despite these challenges, the 4K experience is a truly immersive one. When playing games or watching videos natively at 4K, it's like having a TV in front of you without the need for a separate device. The bezel effect, which has long been a criticism of surround systems, is eliminated on a monitor, allowing for a more engaging and interactive experience.

The arrival of affordable 4K monitors is also a significant development. With prices starting at around $500, it's now possible to own a high-quality 4K display without breaking the bank. However, there's one major omission - G-Sync support. This technology, which reduces screen tearing in fast-paced games, is still noticeably absent from many of these early 4K monitors.

Asus, a company that has been at the forefront of PC monitor innovation, is set to address this issue with its upcoming $1000 4K G-Sync monitor. With its 60Hz refresh rate and impressive specs, it's clear that they're committed to delivering a top-notch display experience. Whether or not it's worth the investment will depend on individual preferences and needs, but for PC gamers and productivity enthusiasts who crave the best possible display, this monitor promises to be a game-changer.

In conclusion, the 4K experience is a truly exciting development in the world of PC displays. With its improved pixel density, beautiful colors, and immersive design, it's no wonder that many are eagerly anticipating the arrival of these monitors. While challenges remain, including scaling and website compatibility issues, the benefits of 4K technology make it an essential upgrade for anyone serious about their computing experience. As we look to the future of display technology, one thing is certain - 4K monitors will continue to play a major role in shaping our computing landscape.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwith its factory tuning and data center dna an intel 730 series ssd is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts all right so this video might be coming at a bit of a strange time if the focus was going to be on this exact model of 4k monitor which was first shown off way back at computex 2013 and has been available pretty much since then at around three thousand to thirty five hundred dollars an early adopter price point if i've ever seen one no instead the focus of this video is going to be on my experience of using a 4k display because this is the first time i've actually gotten the opportunity to try one in the comfort of my own home and at work and now that 4k is finally coming down in price with asus pb 287q coming at around 800 bucks for a 28 inch model it is a very exciting time to take a look at this sexy technology so first i'll give a rundown of this one this very gorgeous pq 321q that i guess i can hold hostage now until asu sends one of the new ones unlike the low-cost variants that will feature tn panels of various quality this monitor features an exo or indium gallium zinc oxide based panel there's a great post actually by a complete stranger who goes by the handle of glenwing on overclock.net linked in the video description that does a great job of explaining the benefits of this technology but in short because an exo panel's controlling transistors are smaller respond more quickly and can even be clear we can get faster response times higher higher pixel densities and more power efficient or even transparent displays for the rest of the specs we'll move pretty fast here this thing is a beast it weighs 30 pounds much of which is the robust stand it consumes about as much power as an idling gaming desktop at about 80 to 90 watts and it's got a 31 and a half inch 3840 by 2160 led edge lit screen with one of the best anti-glare coatings that i've ever seen it's actually i think the perfect balance between reducing reflections and still keeping colors vibrant looking not scattering the light too much the unit is super thin 35 millimeters at the back which contrasts sharply with the dell 30 inch monitor that we use for high-res benchmarking and this thinness is enabled by an external power brick versus having an internal power supply i've seen other reviewers complain about this approach but i disagree 100 percent i would rather take up space on my floor with big power bricks than space on my desk which i can actually use it's not like i'll be moving this thing around speaking of movement it has height adjust pivot and tilt but no portrait rotate mode you can actually take the screws off and then put it in portrait mode permanently but it's not something that you can just switch between easily it has a side mounted displayport 1.2 connector with two side mounted hdmi connectors it should be noted that due to the way this monitor works it's basically like two monitors side by side with no bezel in between you will need to use either a displayport device that supports multi-stream so it's 1.2 or higher or two separate hdmi cables going into both ports if you want to run the monitor at 4k 60hz with stronger displayport implementations in hdmi 2 coming soon this won't be an issue on future models but it is something to bear in mind here the monitor uses a sharp exo panel capable of producing 1.07 billion colors with a reasonable degree of accuracy but with some tendency towards a roamer a warmer overall tone to the image it should be noted that it was never really marketed as a pro art series for serious color work so it should still be good enough for most people the buttons for controlling the on-screen display are around the back and this is unusual but they actually aren't even labeled on the front they're only labeled on the back of the monitor it's okay though an optional sticker is included if you want to be able to see what you're doing but given that the on-screen display doesn't have a ton of useful options like asus's pro art series does i would probably just leave the front label off for a super clean aesthetic if it was mine okay back to that panel type again i've mentioned this a few times exo is not actually strictly speaking a panel type like ips or tn and apart from telling us that it's exo-based asus hasn't been entirely forthright with what type of panel is in the pq321q but on pcmonitors.info they figure it's an ips or similar display which makes sense given the strong colors and outstanding viewing angles if you want more details on the monitor particularly with respect to color reproduction for professional work or more nitty gritty details of the spec anontec did an excellent review of it which i'll link in the video description the rest of this video will focus on my experience using it and my thoughts on the upgrade to 4k so i'll open with this a bigger screen is not always a great upgrade i used a 30 inch samsung monitor as my daily driver for a couple of years and while it was great once i got used to it scaling back to 27 as i recently did has actually been just fine too but some people will always want bigger and better so if you do want a huge display then you need to consider pixel density there was a period of time when many folks particularly gamers were buying 32-inch tvs with resolutions as low as 1366 by 768 and then lolling at me at lens for paying so much for my 1920x1200 24 inch monitor which was obviously much smaller but that kind of solution was always very fatiguing for me to look at if you increase the size but not the pixel density text and icon sizes are effectively blown up making everything look blocky if you increase both pixel density and size proportionally you get effectively more of the same level of detail and same size text and icons but when you ramp up resolution faster than size you get a very different computing experience and everything starts to look much more crisp or as apple would call it retinae at 140 pixels per inch the pq 321q is the highest density desktop monitor i've ever used by a significant margin about 30 percent better than a 27 inch 1440p display and it's incredible to see how sharp everything looks the only challenge is that while ramping up resolution gives us more screen real estate to spread out our work it also decreases the size of elements now to the point where it's hard to read text and click on things accurately unless the solution to this of course is scaling which is what smart os is like android and ios do but unfortunately windows doesn't handle scaling amazingly well because even with improvements in windows 8 which i unfortunately don't use yet third-party software makers need to support it for it to work properly from within applications what this means is that if i leave the scale at 100 percent windows explorer text has the same sharpness as text in 7-zip or steam but if i scale to 150 all of a sudden text in third-party applications can look terrible by comparison it is not just isolated to these two applications there are some other things that behave strangely at such enormous resolution as well remember that this is effectively four 16-inch 1080p monitors side-by-side and stacked with no bezels between them websites designed for fixed width will just float in a sea of emptiness in the middle of your screen and dynamic websites won't fare much better with elements stretched out to the edges of the screen or even just broken out right one solution to that is to split your monitor into virtual smaller ones using third-party software but that'll just take some tinkering for you to get things set up the way that you wanted it's just something to think about speaking of the way you want things for all the complaining i've done about scaling and text and whatever else the 4k experience when you're doing it right when you're enjoying native content is absolutely unreal it's one thing to see a 4k tv at a trade show it's another thing entirely to have one two feet in front of your play base playing all of your favorite games natively at 4k because pc games support that stuff as long as you have the graphics horsepower for it it is a great time to be a pc gamer because of the improved pixel density i find myself hardly even needing anti-aliasing anymore in dirt 3 i went from 0x to 2x to 4x and then it got to the point where i had to have my nose like six inches from the screen to see any jaggies whatsoever when you add to that the beautiful colors and respectable but not amazing processing leg on this monitor the experience is unlike anything else i've always found that surround would be okay for me but the bezel just totally takes away from the immersion well this it's just it's there in your field of view and it looks amazing i mean i think the craziest and most exciting thing about it is that while i found over 30 inches to be a little bit big this technology is coming soon to smaller display sizes which means even higher pixel density and at lower prices 4k might not matter much to me for my tv but for my desktop computer it makes a really big difference it's like when i moved from 24 inch 1200p to 30 inch 1600p all over again it's absolutely beautiful the one thing i really need to see though before i'd be willing to drop 800 to a thousand dollars on a really nice 4k monitor is g-sync support i noticed this at nvidia's montreal event when they had some 4k tv gaming demos running but the larger the screen the more noticeable giant tearing artifacts across it are to me vsync is a solution but it adds more leg to what i'm already expecting to be slower than average monitors in this first round of affordable 4k monitors although i haven't like tested any of them yet so when asus delivers about a thousand dollar 4k 60hz g-sync monitor they will not be able to take my money fast enough thank you guys very much for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have any comments duh if you want to discuss this product we have a link in the video description to the linus tech tips forum we also have a link for supporting us if you felt the need to do that you think our videos are great we should keep making them you can give us a monthly contribution you can buy a t-shirt or you can even do stuff as simple as changing your amazon bookmark in your browser to one that has our affiliate code in it so we get a little kickback every time you buy stuff i think that pretty much wraps it up guys thank you for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe to linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videoswith its factory tuning and data center dna an intel 730 series ssd is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts all right so this video might be coming at a bit of a strange time if the focus was going to be on this exact model of 4k monitor which was first shown off way back at computex 2013 and has been available pretty much since then at around three thousand to thirty five hundred dollars an early adopter price point if i've ever seen one no instead the focus of this video is going to be on my experience of using a 4k display because this is the first time i've actually gotten the opportunity to try one in the comfort of my own home and at work and now that 4k is finally coming down in price with asus pb 287q coming at around 800 bucks for a 28 inch model it is a very exciting time to take a look at this sexy technology so first i'll give a rundown of this one this very gorgeous pq 321q that i guess i can hold hostage now until asu sends one of the new ones unlike the low-cost variants that will feature tn panels of various quality this monitor features an exo or indium gallium zinc oxide based panel there's a great post actually by a complete stranger who goes by the handle of glenwing on overclock.net linked in the video description that does a great job of explaining the benefits of this technology but in short because an exo panel's controlling transistors are smaller respond more quickly and can even be clear we can get faster response times higher higher pixel densities and more power efficient or even transparent displays for the rest of the specs we'll move pretty fast here this thing is a beast it weighs 30 pounds much of which is the robust stand it consumes about as much power as an idling gaming desktop at about 80 to 90 watts and it's got a 31 and a half inch 3840 by 2160 led edge lit screen with one of the best anti-glare coatings that i've ever seen it's actually i think the perfect balance between reducing reflections and still keeping colors vibrant looking not scattering the light too much the unit is super thin 35 millimeters at the back which contrasts sharply with the dell 30 inch monitor that we use for high-res benchmarking and this thinness is enabled by an external power brick versus having an internal power supply i've seen other reviewers complain about this approach but i disagree 100 percent i would rather take up space on my floor with big power bricks than space on my desk which i can actually use it's not like i'll be moving this thing around speaking of movement it has height adjust pivot and tilt but no portrait rotate mode you can actually take the screws off and then put it in portrait mode permanently but it's not something that you can just switch between easily it has a side mounted displayport 1.2 connector with two side mounted hdmi connectors it should be noted that due to the way this monitor works it's basically like two monitors side by side with no bezel in between you will need to use either a displayport device that supports multi-stream so it's 1.2 or higher or two separate hdmi cables going into both ports if you want to run the monitor at 4k 60hz with stronger displayport implementations in hdmi 2 coming soon this won't be an issue on future models but it is something to bear in mind here the monitor uses a sharp exo panel capable of producing 1.07 billion colors with a reasonable degree of accuracy but with some tendency towards a roamer a warmer overall tone to the image it should be noted that it was never really marketed as a pro art series for serious color work so it should still be good enough for most people the buttons for controlling the on-screen display are around the back and this is unusual but they actually aren't even labeled on the front they're only labeled on the back of the monitor it's okay though an optional sticker is included if you want to be able to see what you're doing but given that the on-screen display doesn't have a ton of useful options like asus's pro art series does i would probably just leave the front label off for a super clean aesthetic if it was mine okay back to that panel type again i've mentioned this a few times exo is not actually strictly speaking a panel type like ips or tn and apart from telling us that it's exo-based asus hasn't been entirely forthright with what type of panel is in the pq321q but on pcmonitors.info they figure it's an ips or similar display which makes sense given the strong colors and outstanding viewing angles if you want more details on the monitor particularly with respect to color reproduction for professional work or more nitty gritty details of the spec anontec did an excellent review of it which i'll link in the video description the rest of this video will focus on my experience using it and my thoughts on the upgrade to 4k so i'll open with this a bigger screen is not always a great upgrade i used a 30 inch samsung monitor as my daily driver for a couple of years and while it was great once i got used to it scaling back to 27 as i recently did has actually been just fine too but some people will always want bigger and better so if you do want a huge display then you need to consider pixel density there was a period of time when many folks particularly gamers were buying 32-inch tvs with resolutions as low as 1366 by 768 and then lolling at me at lens for paying so much for my 1920x1200 24 inch monitor which was obviously much smaller but that kind of solution was always very fatiguing for me to look at if you increase the size but not the pixel density text and icon sizes are effectively blown up making everything look blocky if you increase both pixel density and size proportionally you get effectively more of the same level of detail and same size text and icons but when you ramp up resolution faster than size you get a very different computing experience and everything starts to look much more crisp or as apple would call it retinae at 140 pixels per inch the pq 321q is the highest density desktop monitor i've ever used by a significant margin about 30 percent better than a 27 inch 1440p display and it's incredible to see how sharp everything looks the only challenge is that while ramping up resolution gives us more screen real estate to spread out our work it also decreases the size of elements now to the point where it's hard to read text and click on things accurately unless the solution to this of course is scaling which is what smart os is like android and ios do but unfortunately windows doesn't handle scaling amazingly well because even with improvements in windows 8 which i unfortunately don't use yet third-party software makers need to support it for it to work properly from within applications what this means is that if i leave the scale at 100 percent windows explorer text has the same sharpness as text in 7-zip or steam but if i scale to 150 all of a sudden text in third-party applications can look terrible by comparison it is not just isolated to these two applications there are some other things that behave strangely at such enormous resolution as well remember that this is effectively four 16-inch 1080p monitors side-by-side and stacked with no bezels between them websites designed for fixed width will just float in a sea of emptiness in the middle of your screen and dynamic websites won't fare much better with elements stretched out to the edges of the screen or even just broken out right one solution to that is to split your monitor into virtual smaller ones using third-party software but that'll just take some tinkering for you to get things set up the way that you wanted it's just something to think about speaking of the way you want things for all the complaining i've done about scaling and text and whatever else the 4k experience when you're doing it right when you're enjoying native content is absolutely unreal it's one thing to see a 4k tv at a trade show it's another thing entirely to have one two feet in front of your play base playing all of your favorite games natively at 4k because pc games support that stuff as long as you have the graphics horsepower for it it is a great time to be a pc gamer because of the improved pixel density i find myself hardly even needing anti-aliasing anymore in dirt 3 i went from 0x to 2x to 4x and then it got to the point where i had to have my nose like six inches from the screen to see any jaggies whatsoever when you add to that the beautiful colors and respectable but not amazing processing leg on this monitor the experience is unlike anything else i've always found that surround would be okay for me but the bezel just totally takes away from the immersion well this it's just it's there in your field of view and it looks amazing i mean i think the craziest and most exciting thing about it is that while i found over 30 inches to be a little bit big this technology is coming soon to smaller display sizes which means even higher pixel density and at lower prices 4k might not matter much to me for my tv but for my desktop computer it makes a really big difference it's like when i moved from 24 inch 1200p to 30 inch 1600p all over again it's absolutely beautiful the one thing i really need to see though before i'd be willing to drop 800 to a thousand dollars on a really nice 4k monitor is g-sync support i noticed this at nvidia's montreal event when they had some 4k tv gaming demos running but the larger the screen the more noticeable giant tearing artifacts across it are to me vsync is a solution but it adds more leg to what i'm already expecting to be slower than average monitors in this first round of affordable 4k monitors although i haven't like tested any of them yet so when asus delivers about a thousand dollar 4k 60hz g-sync monitor they will not be able to take my money fast enough thank you guys very much for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have any comments duh if you want to discuss this product we have a link in the video description to the linus tech tips forum we also have a link for supporting us if you felt the need to do that you think our videos are great we should keep making them you can give us a monthly contribution you can buy a t-shirt or you can even do stuff as simple as changing your amazon bookmark in your browser to one that has our affiliate code in it so we get a little kickback every time you buy stuff i think that pretty much wraps it up guys thank you for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe to linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos\n"