have you ever bought something thinking surely this is as good as it gets at
least for a while this guy sure did blew from the writing team loved alienware's
first QD OLED gaming monitor so much
when we reviewed it earlier this year that he put his name on a waiting list
paid 1300 US Dollars and waited almost
three months to finally get his baby
since then he never misses an opportunity to flex that he has the best
display on the Block even the Alienware cutie ol that I have for instance I've
just gotten my Alienware cutie OLED finally I own a display I got it
crazy right but he's about to learn a painful lesson being an early adopter
sucks it's been just over six months
since that monitor hit the market and Dell Alienware has already released a
follow-up for us patient Gamers not only
is it 200 cheaper but it's more color
accurate out of the box has more features available comes in black and
allows user firmware updates to be honest I didn't see this coming so soon
either Samsung doesn't even have a monitor with this panel yet and their
display division makes the bloody thing maybe there's a catch maybe the new one
Cuts an important Corner thankfully our new specialist for the lab Brandon 2 is
here to help shed some light on the situation like I'm gonna shed some light
on our sponsor MSI their new GeForce RTX
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foreign
physically these two are almost identical aside from the color scheme
almost the refreshed DWF now has two
DisplayPort 1.4 ports instead of two HDMI 2.0s but the 4 Port USB hub with
mouse and keyboard dongle friendly positioning dual three and a half
millimeter Jacks and simple C13 power input should all be familiar the RGB is
slightly different though and you'll feel a difference when you pick them up
Alienware managed to shed about a pound and a half from the updated model firing
them up the differences are even less obvious our hilarious behind the scenes
videos on Floatplane.com have never looked better and quantum dot OLED or QD
OLED for short displays are simply the best for gaming amazing color accuracy
and wide color gamut thanks to the quantum dots Lightning Fast pixel
response times and Inky blacks thanks to the self-emissive OLED pixels now the
newer F model is rated for 165 Hertz
refresh rate compared to 170 95 for the
OG one and you won't be making up that difference with an overclock we did try
but we've also shown that there's a point of diminishing returns for high
refresh rate displays and the difference between 165 and 175 that 10 Hertz is a
lot smaller than the difference between 60 and 70 even though they're both 10
Hertz now one concern we had was that Dell might have slimmed the new model by
cutting down its power supply or its cooling which could hurt HDR performance
but in practice both of them managed to
get within Striking Distance of their rated 1000 nits Peak brightness meaning
that whichever one you choose you're going to be looking at a gaming session
that is buttery smooth and bright enough to flashbang yourself in a dark room so
how did they cut the weight and cost turns out you got to look really closely
by not paying NVIDIA the original DW has
a g-sync ultimate module inside which honestly NVIDIA doesn't even seem to
know the purpose of anymore something about low latency variable refresh rate
and lifelike HDR whatever that is but
then the new one has freesync premium Pro which on paper has all those same
benefits anyway maybe the g-sync module helped them push that extra 10 Hertz
we'll never know but the reality is that variable refresh rate Tech is really at
its best on something like a console where it can eliminate tearing and mask
stutters when the frame rate dips Below 60fps on a top of the line High refresh
rate display like either of these ones with a powerful GPU which you probably
already own you're more likely to run your frame rate uncapped anyway for the
lowest possible latency so let's change gears then and talk about
color accuracy both of our dwfs and our
DW came Factory calibrated with Delta e averages of less than two that's
accurate enough that even to the train die any differences should be
indiscernible but the DWS results are
even better in both the srgb and P3
color spaces it managed a Delta e of less than one straight out of the box I
mean it's the same panel so how did they do it
ah this is interesting based on their spec sheets here QC at the factory is
done using a more accurate testing tool now specifically a ca410 instead of an
mk550t so it seems like in the extra
time that Del Alienware has had they've refined their setup yielding
significantly better results although it is also possible that they cherry-picked
these units they were provided by Dell now let's talk about HDR which used to
be NVIDIA's primary selling point for g-sync ultimate their module was after
all the first to support variable refresh rate and HDR at the same time
and it seems like they might still be ahead of the competition here to be
clear there's no best approach to HDR tone mapping but there are best
practices unfortunately these best practices can be different for different
types of content and NVIDIA seems laser focused on gaming for HDR gaming on
Windows the DW's NVIDIA certified approach to managing super bright on
screen objects looks a lot better and
the reason is that when you go through the process of calibrating your game
during setup the point of that is to tell the game what the capabilities of
your monitor are so that it can stay within them only peaking or losing
detail in the image where the developer wants it to let's say as part of their
artistic vision for how it should feel when an interrogation light turns on for
comparison out of the box the DWF is
going to try to maintain detail in bright objects by compressing them into
the upper range of its capabilities this is a little hard to wrap your brain
around but bear with me here say you had two light sources right next to each
other in a scene one of them at a thousand and one at three thousand nits
well this display might attempt to show both of them without peaking by going
900 and 950 nits to represent that this
one is brighter even if it's outside of its capabilities well the theory here is
sound and this connection really be a very good thing for films that were shot
and mastered for the capabilities of future displays that do have that range
but in games it messes with that
calibration process because it makes the game think that the display is capable
of much higher Peak brightness so in practice you actually end up with more
clipping rather than better preserved detail now this may have been an
intentional move from Dell Some people prefer an HDR image that pops even if
they lose some detail but as an artist's intent snob it's really not my cup of
tea thankfully the DWF does include a source tone mapping mode as an option
for those who want more accuracy but it's still not quite as accurate as the
DW one neat trick the DWF has up its
sleeve that the DW can't do though is the ability to accept a 4K HDR signal
and this is a must if you're trying to game on an Xbox series X with HDR
enabled that's a clear win from Mr blackfeet here and it's about to get a
whole lot more of them picture in picture or picture by picture is
supported it has more HDR color modes the OSD is more responsive you can
change the aspect ratio to 4x3 for retro content you can adjust the sharpness Hue
gain saturation and offset while the DW can only do saturation and if you want
some test patterns for calibration or to check for defects the
aw3423dwf comes with those built in and
the dumbest part of all of this it's probably that lack of g-sync ultimate
that you paid a whole bunch more money for that's right that module that we're
paying extra for and not even really using makes it next to impossible for a
home user to update the firmware on the DW we reached out to Dell and they have
confirmed that if there is an issue with your display you can send it in and they
will attempt a firmware update as part of the fix but only they can do it
because of some specific tool that that's required for this module and they
won't do it on demand so if some new mode or feature gets rolled out in later
revisions of the monitor your display if it's otherwise fine tough break kit
the DWF however not only comes with the latest and greatest firmware but since
we're no longer limited by the physical module we can simply update it ourselves
so not only have you now paid 200 less by waiting nine months but you're
actually getting more features out of the box with the ability to potentially
get even more over time is that so is
that someone crying that's all ready
weird to be clear this doesn't happen
with every new technology and it usually doesn't happen this quickly but it's
certainly a bummer when it does which raises the question should you hold off
on that big purchase that you might have been considering as funny as it's been
to joke about I don't think ploof actually regrets this purchase he paid a
lot of money and the DWF is pretty cool but he's also been using arguably the
best gaming monitor on the planet for the last six months and he pretty much
still does one thing that's worked out really well for him is that he pretty
much never notices the text fringing issue that some have complained about
with these qdo lid panels and compared to my regular OLED gaming display that
I've been using for less than a month he has no image retention whatsoever while
I have some so it's always a personal
decision are you happy with what you're getting for your money well if you are
then don't let some shiny new toy make you feel bad about it there's always
going to be something better coming and often for cheaper but we don't love our
gadgets because having the best one makes us feel Superior we love them
because of what they enable like great gaming experiences on that note by the
way we've got some new testing equipment in the lab a photodiode and oscilloscope
that are both fast enough to measure the response times of oleds and we've been
looking for an excuse to throw them at the original DW as it turns out that's
one area where somewhat predictably both of these performed identically with just
.16 millisecond black to white transition times that is absolutely
freaking incredible but bye LCD see you
later so regardless of which one you choose and we're going to have them both linked down below it's clear that now is
a heck of a time to pick up a top-tier gaming display Samsung MSI and Philips
all have qdo-led monitors coming out over the next few months or a year some
of which are going to have cool features that these ones don't have like power
delivery for one cable charging your laptop but don't feel bad about that
just enjoy the tech like you're going to enjoy this Segway to our sponsor jackery
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website and socials to learn more thanks for watching if you guys enjoyed this
video maybe check out my pg42 uq video where I upgraded my home and office that
thing is pretty sick but I do have lines
from Arrow snap down the middle and