Gigabyte aura sponsored this video and while i've been a huge fan of gaming on
ultrawide monitors ever since their debut around seven years ago today
they have a bit of a problem and that's price compared to the f048u or other
large format oleds ultra wides tend to be priced as though they still have the
parts of the display that have kind of been sliced off to narrow the field of
view now this does contribute to a more cinematic experience but it was actually
wendell from level one text that initially made the argument to me he goes Linus
why are you paying extra for a sliced off monitor when you could just have a
bigger one and put the black bars on it for that cinematic view now
if we were talking about conventional monitor technology i would say look i
don't want two glowing black bars
shining at me while i'm trying to experience my game or my movie but with
OLED you can turn those pixels off
so why settle why not have cinematic ultrawide when
you want it and full gigantic 16x9 when
you want to get some work done let's take a look at the f048u and find out if
i am going to be abandoning ultrawide once
and for all
i actually actually can't figure out how this box opens it has the normal
conventional monitor opening things here
but then it has more tv style ones here
um let's try doing it the monitor way now
Gigabyte ioris did sponsor this video which entitles them to a couple of key
product talking points but before we even get to those we gotta acknowledge
the elephant in the room there is only one manufacturer of 48-inch OLED panels
right now lg display so that means any price
premium Gigabyte ars demands for the f-048u
will have to be justified whether it's by the accessory package or by the
gaming and monitor centric features that they've built into the display that
uphill battle begins with an accessory package that is more interesting than it
at first appears to be starting with the remote unlike an lg smart tv you're not
going to have a built-in netflix app or anything like that but what you will
have hopefully is more gaming centric features in a more conventional monitor
osd the next thing we find here a
displayport cable that's right no tv on the market that i'm aware of supports
displayport 1.4 now whether we're actually able to leverage that to run at
144hz 4k with overclocking remains to be
seen but uh a girl can dream right an HDMI ultra
high speed cable for the included HDMI 2.1 port you could use that for your
game console for example there's a usb 3 cable so it'll have a built-in hub like
you would expect from a monitor power cord and this product warranty card
now while the c10 and the c1 can be used
as desktop displays there are a few sort of
quirks that begins with the stand which on the c148 inch is a long wide foot that makes
it difficult to run cables under your monitor with that said i'm not a huge
fan of these sort of widespread little feet either though thankfully both of
them have vase amounts on the back so you can ultimately put them on whatever
stand you like the bigger issue though is that on the
tv version of this panel not all of the input modes are optimized for gaming and
more importantly the brightness will automatically modulate that is to say it
will dim when it detects a static image this is to help reduce the chance of the
pixels wearing out or becoming burned in
now you can alleviate this and most of
the issues with using an lg OLED as a desktop display but in doing so you
could end up actually voiding your warranty by changing unauthorized
settings in the service menu that is why i held up the warranty card
and that is where this monitor might end up standing out for people who really
want to use an OLED as a large format desktop display of course some of the
other benefits aren't very well laid out on the product page and i don't even
know if they are benefits for example there's a usb type-c port here
what does it do i have no idea there's a three and a
half millimeter input as well as the headphone jack that presumably will
carry the audio stream from your HDMI 2.1 or displayport 1.4 input and ah this
is a key benefit navigation can be done with the nipple on the bottom of the
display rather than using the remote if you want to which is nice i actually am
using a c10 48 inch at work right now
and having to have the remote on my desk does add unnecessary clutter oh shoot i
gotta move my old monitor by the way if you're confused as to why
i ended up with the lg ultra gear on my desk after the ASUS version kind of won
the shootout that i was doing it came down to the lower pixel response times
on this particular model which is what makes this aorus display
such a contender for my desk because OLED inherently has much
much lower pixel response times than well really any lcd based technology
one small challenge is going to be my streaming stuff and
the cable management holes that i drilled in my desk though that purple
cast when it's off you can really tell it's an lg OLED hey so the bad news is
you're paying a lot more than for the lg version but the good news is you know
that it's an absolutely kick-ass panel you're just paying extra
for warranty the displayport port
oh actually and the integrated soundbar
i haven't tried this yet but obviously being a tv the c10 and the c1 do not
have great integrated sound because they have no visible speaker grilles
hopefully this is a little better i already have a usb
oh my shoot my pre-run cables don't reach
now seems like as good a time as any to get in some of Gigabyte aorus talking
points here let me change my desktop wallpaper this
is a little awkward oh this is hilarious i already mentioned
everything organically except it's support for 10-bit color obviously and
it's 98 coverage of the dci p3 color space now something that's not well
understood about this monitor is its HDR capabilities it does say on the product
page it supports both HDR 10 and hlg now
i've already noticed when bringing up large full screen white content
i am seeing some dimming of the display you guys notice that do you see how
bright that is and then if i go full screen you can see it's a little dimmer right but what i
also noticed is it seems to be a bit faster in terms of that responsiveness
whether you prefer that or not is entirely up to you but let's see what we
can do to tune it in the menu so we're in sdr
vivid really my options are custom one custom
two and green oh green like
green like power saving i thought you meant green like a green tint that's
very uh Gigabyte i'd like you to change that call it eco or something please oh oh
there's a whole bunch more reader movie rts rpg FPS arcade standard
that's weird okay burn this image into your mind pun
intended is green brighter than vivid
it is no it doesn't really make anything but
it is type c
dsc i think that's display stream compression i think it has a type c
display input andy that's nice i'm gonna go get my laptop and find out man
imagine it has usb power delivery and charges the laptop
and just like has that completely not documented it totally does it has power
delivery it charges the laptop since we're poking around in the md control
panel the reported freesync refresh rate is 48 to 120 hertz so as long as you
don't dip below 48 frames per second in your game you shouldn't experience any
stutter or tearing after fiddling with it i wish i had a more complete answer
for you guys but i do at least have some information it supports power delivery
but with a very limited amount of power so you'll probably have to plug in your
laptop separately and over the type c port it does accept a display input but
so far i've only managed to go as far as 4k 60 hertz or 1440p 120 hertz it's hard
to say whether that's limitation of my laptop or the display at this point and
i don't have any alternatives here with me oh cool it has a built-in kvm switch
so that's a function of the built-in usb hub i guess
of course the type c and the type b
can be your alternate computers
freaking sick and then you plug your mouse and keyboard into the usb a ports
i don't actually need that function personally but if you frequently use two
computers say for example you're a developer that would be super handy
audio mode 600r i have no idea what i just did
what is 600r uh
okay we're back on the type c input okay we're back 600r is a setting that
allows you to tune the audio output for high impedance headphones
it also caused my displayport input to immediately cease functioning actually
wait andy this is interesting i'm only getting 4k 60 hertz here as well
i wonder if there's another displayport setting i didn't see before the good
news is that 4k 120 hertz works just
fine the bad news is that this Thunderbolt 3 dock that i use actually
only supports displayport 1.2 so that means 4k 60 hertz unless i want
to drag a displayport cable through the wall right now
okay i'm plugging in a new cable what is this doing back here look at this cute
Linus plushie ltteststore.com it's not exactly ideal but this is the
longest displayport cable i have i'm gonna have to fix the cable management
later but i should be able to set it to 4k 120hz now
yeah hey
i do notice a little bit of a of a green tinge when i'm off axis so when i'm
looking into the corners just because the display is so large so i would
recommend having a solid 18 to maybe even 24 inches between you and the
display if you do plan to use it as a desktop display it's hard to really
gauge performance without all of our gear and a 48 inch tv to put right
beside it but what i will say about the HDR content consumption experience is
that compared to Gigabyte aorus's specs
this is a lot better than i expected of course not everything's HDR let's change
gears and focus on gaming i'll start with one of my all-time favorite games
which happens to benefit from as much screen real estate as you can possibly
throw at it supreme commander forged alliance so one of the coolest things
about this game is the strategic zoom you don't have a mini-map you just use
your mouse wheel to see the whole map
and i'm being bombed i did not build
lay fighters well i did say i wanted this to be a quick one didn't i
yep that was it that's the gg either way
is this a great gaming experience uh freaking yeah a little bit now let's
change gears and talk about how we can set this up for the more cinematic black
bar experience uh instead of having the scaling performed on our display we're
going to have it performed on our GPU and we're going to change our scaling
mode to aspect ratio you can also change it to no scaling and then you'll just
have like kind of however many pixels you
specify sized display in the middle like for example the 3840 by 1800
resolution that i made that's going to give me some kind of cinematic black
bars but is going to allow me to continue to utilize the full
horizontal resolution of my display so let's go ahead and fire up do maternal
and there you have it cinematic
ultra wide gaming experience on a regular 16x9 monitor
tv whatever whatever this thing is the one thing you can't do is make it curved
obviously and that's something that can be an advantage on a display of this
size which leaves us one more major thing to uncover
can it support 144 hertz with overclocking that would
be an advantage over a tv
so far it's not looking good sometimes monitors will have a setting that allows
them to enable overclocking i don't see anything
like that in here though so all that's left is to try this one more time and
see if it clicks okay we go into the settings menu it thinks
it's at 4k 144 hertz it's actually at 120 hertz so the scaler might think it
can take a 144hz input but the actual panel does not seem to be running at
144. um i thought maybe ars figured out
some kind of super cool way to get it to run at 144. the reality of it is it's
not a huge difference between 120 and 144 in terms of the perception but
i mean hey every little bit counts the last things left you can't take a step
forward without a legal thing
yeah the built-in speakers are they're okay
they're bigger and they fire directly at you which is an advantage but
they're still monitor speakers and you're still gonna need a nice pair of cans
and that's it whether or not you need a monitor like this well that's up to
you but i can tell you that the experience of using a large format
display like this as a gaming monitor unfreaking believable and i will not
be swapping this out for my ultra ride this is coming with me to the new house
and my new gaming setup so i'll probably get like a vase amount for it so it
comes off the back of the desk and i have like a nice clean setup