Volitions Advocate on 27/7/2016 at 06:16

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I realize this thread will probably end up buried with perhaps very little interest but I thought I'd try.

I was the first person to jump right on the surround gaming bandwagon when ATI introduced Eyefinity, and there are some posts of mine during the last few years talking about it, but I don't think it has really caught on much. It is certainly a lot of fun to use, especially in sneaking games like Thief or Alien Isolation. I've been a member of the wall-of-monitors club for a long time and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to justify. It actually makes things pretty complicated in programs that use plugins, like a lot of the audio work that I do. The plugins usually have to reside within the host window, which means it has to span all across the other monitors in order to take full advantage of the real estate. Also my stereo image was always skewed because my speakers were too far apart to accomodate 3 22" monitors, and I'm supposed to know better than that because I'm an audio guy.

Well I've been looking at these Korean LCD panels for awhile. I know that a lot of people took a gamble on the 1440p monitors that came from there because they were about 1/2 the price of an american made one, but used the same panels (b-stock or QA rejects). This usually meant stuck or dead pixels somewhere in the display, and a barebones unit with no On-screen display or only a single DVI port or something along those lines.

Well they've been doing 4K screens the same way for over a year now, and I finally had the opportunity to buy one, so I did. The only place you can seem to find these is on eBay so I bought mine from a store called DreamSeller who seems to be one of the main guys who stocks and sells stuff like this.

I got the AMH A409U which is a 40" 4K computer monitor. Or.. computer monitor / TV. or something. They've had 2 versions of it and mine is version 2, which apparently has a different controller than the original.

Native resolution is 3840 x 2160 (exactly 4x the pixels of a 1080p) and if I'm using Displayport I can get that at 60hz with full 4:4:4 chroma (which doesn't matter to me as much as it does the guys who are editing photos on these things). It runs on HDMI as well, but while the panel has 2.0 ports, my video card only has 1.4 (R9 290), so it will only run at 30hz over HDMI for me.

I'm having some troubles with the DP handshake, but I've just rolled back my video card drivers as per DreamSeller's suggestion and so far it's been okay. It also does have maybe 2 adjacent stuck pixels in the lower right quadrant, but I can only see them if I look for them and the screen is compeltely black. They are hard to see because they are so small.

I bought the panel for about $650 USD ($800 CAD) and I had it in Alberta in just over a week from Korea with a $70 duty. (UPS didn't charge brokerage because it was being shipped expedited, for free I might add)

I have to run the newer games at 1920 x 1080 or they run kind of crappy, but some older games work really well at 4K 60hz. I've been playing Human Revolution without any hiccups and it stays in that 50 - 60 fps range consistently. I have to install some software, but I figure a thread to post some nice screenshots would be nice. Tomorrow I'll start with some DX:HR, Elite Dangerous, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. For now, how about a cell phone shot of what it looks like on my desk.

http://i.imgur.com/aVOUYX4.jpg

My eyefinity setup was 5040 x 1060 with an aspect ratio of 24:5, This is obviously not as wide but at 3840 x 2160, it has about 3 million more pixels on screen than my 3 monitors did.
I'll be happy once I get the displayport glitches out of the way and it is a bit more stable, but I am quite happy with my purchase. With 0 scaling, at native resolution the DPI is about the same as a 27" 1440p monitor. Entirely useable.

Anybody else here making the leap to 4K? This is probably the best and cheapest way to do it on a budget.

Sulphur on 27/7/2016 at 07:41

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^ lewl.

I hear 4K's nice and all, but I'll wait until it becomes widely accepted, and the industry responds with the graphics horsepower to match. I don't much savour the idea of having to go dual or tri-SLI for 60 FPS on the latest and greatest.

twisty on 27/7/2016 at 08:50

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Does HR look much better in 4K? While I have no complaints overall with how it looks on SD, my first and lasting impression of the visuals was of how flat everything looks. I can't imagine it looking that much better without a texture overhaul to match 4K.

Malf on 27/7/2016 at 12:17

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Not 4K here, but as I was discussing with Thirith on Saturday, I picked up a 27" 1440p G-Sync monitor in October last year, and wouldn't go back to gaming without some kind of adaptive sync.

I'd previously tried the Asus ROG Swift 27" TN panel GSync monitor, which sold me on GSync, but I ended up returning due to the absolutely appalling quality of the TN panel; literally, I returned it within 3 days of taking delivery. Anyone who claims that monitor is good quality has never used a quality monitor before. My trusty old Dell 2407WFP puts it to shame for viewing angles and colour quality.

So the one I replace it with was the 27" Acer Predator XB270HU, and that's been a fantastic monitor, as it gives the quality of an IPS screen alongside the benefits of GSync.

In use, GSync adjusts the monitor's refresh to match the game's framerate on the fly, so the result is smooth gaming even at relatively low framerates, with no tearing or stuttering. I'd say the tech's a great investment for older machines and that you wouldn't notice the benefits of it if you were consistently getting high framerates. It also makes sense that as it's higher resolution, framerates are going to be lower, so that again makes the adaptive sync shine. While I have a 970, my CPU and motherboard are quite old now, with them being the performance bottlenecks for sure. Adaptive sync is definitely allowing me to squeeze more life out of my machine!

But that's not to say that gaming at over 100Hz isn't buttery smooth :D
Older games that run at native resolution feel great at high refresh.

Volitions Advocate on 27/7/2016 at 13:37

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Supposedly, there might be a firmware update for this thing that enables Freesync. I don't know that it will really happen, but it wasn't a selling point for me. However, the panel itself can be overclocked using custom resolutions from your video cards control panel. I didn't really get it for gaming exclusively. The nice thing about gaming in 1080p on this monitor is that it scales exactly so that each pixel is a block of 4 pixels on the panel, and I've seen guys running this particular monitor at 240hz. or even 144hz at 1440p.

I wasn't thinking of really upgrading my video card for this, but with the DP being so finicky with my current card, I might just look for a GTX 1060 once they are in stock again. Mostly for the HDMI 2.0 and the modest boost in performance.

DX:HR does look flat. I can only assume with 4K it's probably suffering from the same aesthetic problems that the ps3 remastered collection games did. Like MGS and Silent Hill. now everything is really crisp, and flat. So yeah. I'm just playing it at 4K because I can, haha.

The Rokit 5's have been on my desk for years. They are for mixing, but work great for games too, but only if you have them hooked up to some good hardware. KRK isn't known as top of the line stuff, but they are very transparent and really show off the imperfections in your sound card's DAC. I used to have them hooked up directly through the 1/8" jack on my mobo with an RCA splitter into the back of them. I would mix something in Cubase and then play the file back from my desktop and it would sound like crap. The reason being that I used the ASIO driver for my recording interface while mixing, and had the speakers hooked up directly to its main outputs with XLR cables. It used the DAC on the interface through a firewire cable, but playing the bounced file from the desktop went through my motherboards soundcard which was not of the same quality. So now I just use the recording interface to output the windows audio, meaning my sound card is probably the most expensive piece of gear in my computer, and it's completely outboard via Firewire. Sounds good though! I don't have a sub woofer, and I need one.