As a display owner of the
AW3423DW, I couldn't be happier to see the successor, the
AW3425DW land on my desk. In fact, I requested to unbox this one specifically
as soon as I saw the press release because guess what? It's 240 hertz. And
the best part, unlike the original model that retailed at $1299, this one is
$7.99. It's 800 bucks. You're getting 240 Hz
3440x440p resolution in a roughly 34 in
ultrawide display, but now it's faster.
It's a little more color accurate, and it's so much cheaper. So, let's see what
we get in the box. We've got the new stand from Alienware that I am head over
heels in love with. We've got the other part of our stand. It's absolutely
beautiful. Um, I just love how little of
a footprint this thing has on your desk. Even though the square footage on it is
probably bigger because it's not those two big legs poking out. It's just
easier to put somewhere. I also just love the blue. That's a big problem for
some people, you know, if it's not black or white. It's not going to match everything. But I'm a big blue fan and
so this one really does it for me. Uh, what else do we got in here? We've got
our C13 power cable, HDMI 2.1, because
that's right. Unlike the previous version that only had 2.0, 0. This one's
got full 2.1 HDMI spec. Then we've also got a USBB cable for connecting to our
computer as well as finally our DisplayPort cable. One other minor complaint,
it doesn't have DP 2.1. It is still DP 1.4. However, it's got a really cool
feature where you can actually turn DSC on or off if you really want to. We'll
get to that later. And then we also got this little box here. It's probably just got Yeah. some monitor cleaning cloth
stuff. Be careful. These things are delicate. And you definitely only want
to use distilled water. Be careful. You do all, you know, put it in, click,
clack, pull it out of the box. 34 inch ultra wide is like, it's such a great
size. It's still really easy to handle. It's not super heavy, and it still just
gives you so much monitor real estate. And at 34 in 1440p ultrawide, you're
still getting about 110 PPI, which is
totally usable. Honestly, even sub 100 is okay, but you really want to be over
100 for that nice clarity. Our little film here has been taken off and put
back on because it's been tested. I'm going to take it off again so you don't
have to see these
boobles. It's like Rice Krispies. And I've done the thing I always forget to
do with these curved displays. I want to keep it on the little stand so I can
take a look at the IO cuz unfortunately unlike a flat display, I can't just put
this on the table. So, one moment, please. As for IO, we've got our power
connection here, and then a couple of HDMI 2.1 ports, DisplayPort, and our
USBB port. And then below, what we're
actually missing out on a little bit here is a lack of USBA ports, but where
you lose a couple of USBA ports, they give you USBC. Take it or leave it. I
would rather have the USBC. The only unfortunate thing about
this is that the power delivery on it caps out at 15 watts. So, if you're the
kind of person who wants to like park a laptop and have it charge while you use it with the monitor, it's not going to
have enough juice for that. Sorry. You're going to have to get your power adapter. Click clock. Extract. Look at
one-handed. I love large displays. They're great, but they're heavy.
They're so hard to They're so hard to install yourself. Um, as for the stands
capability, we've got some swivel. We've got height
adjustment. You know, it can go up and down with some tilt. And then I've heard
that it can pivot ever so slightly to the point where we're not calling it
pivot. Oh yeah, it can. Wow. Okay. So,
you're not going to go uh full 90 degrees or anything. But let's say for
whatever reason this thing isn't level. You can just actually adjust it ever so
slightly. It's also got some pretty good cable management. Nice and big open hole
here to stick all your cables in. We're just going to plug some cables in and
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and welcomed to a like please select language thing. Tells me my service tag.
I get a factory color report that is not
here. Oh, there it is. Okay. Not really though. It just tells me that it'll tell
me all of these things. Um, which I can find somewhere. So, that's cool though
that it'll tell you in the OSD as you boot it up. Select yes to enable USB
charging. Absolutely. Let me just look through the OSD here. It looks pretty
standard. They've sharpened it up a little bit.
PIP. If you're one of the dozens of people who use PIP or PBP, aka picturein
picture or picture by picture on the regular, now it can do it. I'm pretty
sure the original model could not do PIP. And I don't use it, but hey, I love
it when I have got features uh that I'll never use, but I can brag about having
pixel refresh, factory reset, self diagnosis, screen test.
Oh, sick. This does come with a three-year warranty that covers image
retention, by the way. But if you're ever worried about it, um, and you think
you're driving it too hard and you maybe want to see if you should do a panel refresh or anything like that, uh, you
can just pop a gray slide on here and look around for it. And you can also
cycle through a bunch of different colors just to make sure it's all good
to go. They've even got this little test pattern on here. You might be sensitive
to color fringing on text. This is a good spot to check for that. Uh, it's a
Gen two panel, so I don't think they had
the big text upgrade uh with these ones, but I was never really sensitive to
color fringing in the first place. A lot of people aren't. Uh, so take that as
you will, and if it works out for you, it works out for you. If it doesn't, well, you know, maybe you just don't
read a lot of text on this thing cuz it is primarily a gaming monitor. Looks
pretty good just out of the box. But we're going to go up to our 240 hertz.
I did plug in through HDMI 2.1 uh for two reasons. One, a graphics card
supports it. And two, uh 2.1 is a little
bit higher bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4. Uh but you know, you might as well
just use get that little bit of extra gigabit per second. And we're going to turn HDR on 10 bit color, baby. 465
nits. That's because we're probably in true black 400 mode. And I don't want to
be in that because I like a 1000 nits. I like my eyes to be seared. Uh, HDR 1000
was actually one of our more color accurate modes as well. We'll get to
testing and everything later on, but uh, this thing's really good. That's all I'm
going to say for now. It's really good. I love the panel health indicator as
well. I don't think that's new. Um, but I just it's a nice feature. I really I
really like it. Bada bing, bada boom. HDR Peak 1000. One thing that is still
missing, Dell, please, Alienware, please put speakers on this thing. I get that
you've got like the lowest price out of everyone coming out with these monitors,
but uh I just want some cheap speakers
that I can use if I can't have headphones or anything. Uh so let's go.
What the is this search results on
YouTube? Tongue tongue tongue saw morning routine. Our HDR footage on a
cutie OLED display. It just it looks stunning every
time. There's Andrew there standing proudly by the cabin. whatever that
thing may be. Uh, I love it. All the colors just pop beautifully and the
vibrancy per pixel, mind you, because it's OLED, so each pixel is self-
emissive. And so that's how you've got this like proper full black, full black,
and then bunch of color here. It's really hard to explain this without having multiple like HDR versions of
displays in front of me to be like, there's that one, there's that one, there's this one. Uh, but when you've
got OLED with self-emissive pixels, it just is incredible. You're not going to
get the bloom that mini LEDs got, and you're not going to get these weird like
columns that some edge lit displays end up having with their like six zone HDR
garbage. I recommended this monitor already to a friend of mine. So, Zach,
if you're watching this video, I hope you're watching it on your brand new
AW3425DW cuz uh it's good, but I know
HDR footage looks good on this thing. What I want to know is is that 240 Hz
refresh rate and lightning fast pixel response time. How's it going to game?
So, let's pop our camera into 60 FPS. pop this up to 240 hertz and play some
video games. I gotta say it looks great. We tested uh display
latency and we got 2.4 milliseconds which is uh.3 over perfect. So, you
know, it's pretty it's pretty good. It's pretty it's pretty fast. Um we've also
tested just in case you're playing consoles, you want to hook up a PS5 to
this thing, especially with that HDMI 2.1 port. Um we measured uh also very
close to perfect or theoretical perfect at least. It's wild. Like, you know, I
remember thinking, I'll never need anything more than 140 hertz or 120
hertz and then you start playing like 240 Hz on the regular and you're like,
man, I get it now. And I bet you, you know, in a few more years, I'll be like,
yeah, 360 Hz is where it's at. How how did I ever deal with 240 Hz? It feels
like garbage. And it's from any angle, too. Like, that's a huge thing about uh
Q OLEDs is that the viewing angles are absolutely wild. like you can be at just
about any point in the room and it's still going to look good. Um the
eight00R curvature I still kind of wish Alienware would just make these things
flat at 1800R it's like hardly anything and so it's I don't know is it even
worth curving it? I'm not sure. Um but I would like to see either a more
aggressive curve or just take it out completely at this point. As for all the
syncs it's G-Sync compatible. It's got Fresync Premium Pro and it's even got
Vas's adaptive sync. The embargo for this was yesterday and there's already
one or two people out there who have them and there's a Reddit post about a
guy who hears a bunch of coil wine on his. Um, I never heard any coil wine on
my original
one. The only coil wine I hear is the
one coming from our GPU. And so if you can hear it, that sucks and you should
probably try to return it or something because uh coil wine is annoying and you
shouldn't have to deal with it on a regular basis. I'm really hoping that was just a guy who got a weird unit. It
does happen. You know, not all of these units are going to be perfect. As for text fringing, let's take a look and see
if we can still see it. Um, we should be able to. It should basically be the same
sub pixel layout as the Gen 1 version, but you know, you might as well just
take a little lookie poo, see if we can notice anything. I got a big notepad
file on here. Uh, I got a bunch of text on it. And I'll be honest, I can see it
if I look really closely, but it's not something that jumps out at me. Um,
what's more noticeable, frankly, especially now that I'm used to a higher PPI monitor, is um the lack of PPI. I'm
not going to do a whole DSC evaluation thing. I just want to like turn the
setting on and off and take a look and see if it's easy at all. Uh, so let's
try to find it in our OSD. Ah, display
DSC on. Turn it off. As for color
accuracy in SDR, we were a little worried at first because we measured an
average of four. In Delta ETP, in Delta
E 2000, we got an average of like 0.8.
Um, so this thing is just great in SDR color accuracy. And then as for HDR
color accuracy, I think we did measure something like 5.6 average delta E ITP
for peak 10000 mode, which is still very good. It's It's just It's just the same
thing from a couple of years ago, but better in basically every single way,
including the price. I Yeah, you might sacrifice some USB
ports. And I'm sure there's something out there that someone is going to be
like, "Oh, well, what about this? How did you forget this?" I don't care. This
thing is great. It's It's such a good monitor at such a good price. And I
think that if you want an ultrawide um that you're not going to worry too much
about when it comes to like image retention and stuff because it has a ton of built-in safety features like a big
graphite layer um it's just it's so good. If this isn't
exactly the one for you, don't worry. I'm sure that later this year we'll get
more and more uh Gen 2 34in ultrawides
coming out with CD OLED panels. You might not get every single feature that
you're looking for in the exact monitor that you want, but they will have a
bunch of different options like maybe they've got more uh power on the USB port for charging or uh you know, maybe
there's a flat one or whatever. But as for me, I love the blue stand. I don't
mind the eight00R curvature and I just
want it first and I want it cheap cuz at
$800, my gosh, it's an incredible gaming monitor. That's still, you know, don't
get me wrong, it's still like a high price, but a few years ago, this thing
would have been thousands.