i am having a pretty good couple of weeks here guys so NVIDIA just sent over
a titan rtx to replace my old titan x
maxwell graphics card so that upgrade is
done but i ran into a new problem my predator x34
is officially holding me back now with its 100 hertz refresh rate fortunately
the long awaited rog swift pg-35v
is finally here it's a clear upgrade in
every way it's 3440 by 1440 resolution
still but it is one inch bigger it's got
HDR with g-sync ultimate and
it manages up to 200hz refresh
so it is finally time after a couple years of this being my reigning gaming
monitor of choice to crack open and upgrade
oh that was not the way to open this but the way to segue into our sponsor is for
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now i do want to get this cracked open right away but before i do that i should
give you guys a bit of an update on what's going on with the personal rig so
the old graphics card is still out
but if you guys recall i actually changed out my CPU and motherboard at
the same time that i put in the titan rtx except one small continuity error
that's my old rampage five extreme with my 5960x in it
so there was something i didn't think of back when i did the upgrade
optical Thunderbolt 3 cables which is what the new motherboard used
don't exist yet so what i'm doing right now is even though i have all these
cables run here is i'm actually back to using my Thunderbolt 2 connection
with my old motherboard now as for the reason that i bring all of that up
i left all this stuff in place because at this point i don't know if my
Thunderbolt 2 connection is going to be
able to carry a displayport 1.4 signal
which it will need to if it's going to be able to do 200 hertz at 3440 by 1440.
so the good news is we've got all the different options
and we're just gonna go with whatever works
oh this thing is pretty heavy isn't it
first impressions like right out of the gate here this thing is really thick
to ASUS's credit they've managed to thin up the bezels quite a bit compared to
their 4k 144hz gaming display
oh from this angle you guys also get a really good look at the curve that is a
tight curve 1800r looking not too bad
i o wise we've got HDMI but
even with HDMI 2.0 you're still limited to 3440 by 1440 100 hertz then we've got
displayport here which is 180 hertz natively 200 hertz overclocked our power
in a usb 3 hub and then that's pretty
much it oh except for this so that is actually a headphone jack so what's
notable here is that this is powered by a higher end amp and dac than you would
normally find integrated into a monitor so you can use it a couple ways you can
pass through your audio from HDMI or displayport just like you normally would
or if you plug in via usb then you get higher definition audio or whatever the
case may be personally i don't find this to be a particularly big deal because
from my perspective if you can afford a twenty five hundred dollar monitor
you can probably also afford a standalone amp and dac so for me i'm
using an o2 headphone amplifier with the dac built in then again the flip side of
it is maybe you spent all of your money on this 2500 monitor and you're very
grateful that it has a better built-in headphone amplification solution
all right now that we've got it assembled looks like we've got about now it looks about like about four or five
inches of height adjust there you go there's your tilt
uh here's your swivel and then there's no no pivot but
you do have a little bit of adjustment just in case your desk is not quite even
um we've got an ambient light sensor on the top so you can disable that but that
can make it so that if your room lighting conditions change then it'll
adjust the backlight speaking of backlights there's lights on
the back this is full RGB if you're into that sort of thing but
for me personally i won't be seeing it so uh
not sure if i care about that but i do like having these controls on the back
with the joystick type interface that is definitely my favorite way to interact
with the monitor all right so let's get this thing replaced
this is a lot heavier this thing is chunky or what is it the
kids say now chunky it's chunky apparently this is a 280
watt power brick that's nuts
i've plugged my DisplayPort pass-through into the back of my
graphics card and i'm pretty sure this isn't gonna work
but hey you know it's worth a shot
well the good news is that the uh fit cable works
i don't know what refresh rate though so i shut down the system we're gonna try a
cold boot swapped out my standard cable for the one running through Thunderbolt
and we're gonna see if it works at all and how far it'll go but
something you guys need to keep in mind is that even if it works perfectly
just like their 4k 144hz gaming display
this one has some some gotchas on the maximum resolution
and refresh rate so if you want to run with no chroma sub
sampling so full 444 RGB color you're
going to be limited to 120 hertz if you want 12 bit color
144 hertz if you want 10 bit color and
180 hertz if you want 8-bit color and of
course at 8-bit color you cannot run HDR
so the only way to go to 200 hertz overclocked is to run 8-bit color again
no HDR then if you're willing to use chroma sub-sampling so that's 422 you
can actually run all the way up to 12-bit color at 200 hertz but you're
going to get that fringing that many people complained about with the 27-inch
4k 144 hertz wow this is just not
working at all okay then i guess we're just gonna have
to run this displayport cable and we're stuck with that then
now the thing about chroma subsampling is that while you'll notice it on text
it's unlikely that many people will notice it in game so your mileage may
vary it's worth trying out now okay we've got it fired up we're
kind of looking at it closely for the first time and it's obvious that our viewing angles are not
quite ips like which kind of makes sense because this is a va as opposed to an
ips panel let's go ahead and see how far we can
push the refresh rate with that cable going to the other room
over there let's go straight to 200 hertz i guess all right so i'm seeing a
little bit of motion blur on the trailing and leading edge of this window
but it's far from the worst i've seen to its credit even though we're running at
200 hertz this text is quite readable
even while i'm moving it around now to ASUS NVIDIA's credit actually on static
text this is at 200 hertz four two to 12
bit i can barely i i honestly can't even
tell but if i move it see that
it starts to look kind of weird and like kind of brown yellow as i move it around
so honestly for myself i think i'd be
far more likely to leave it on 444 and maybe try to hit the 144 hertz refresh
for that full quality but still a significant upgrade in terms of refresh
rate over my old one so now that i've settled on that we can go ahead and
enable HDR which happily doesn't make Windows look like
complete garbage when you're not in games anymore that's pretty nice and we
can go ahead and fire up steam which is a perfect opportunity for us to
have a look at the full array local dimming
that's present on this monitor so unlike their previous 4k display which
had 384 zones this one actually has
512 zones and they're all quite small
only about two and a half centimeters square so what that means is that as a
bright object moves around on the screen the backlight behind it is going to
brighten and then as a dark object moves around it will darken now in a synthetic
situation like this you can see that the effect is really not very convincing and
making adjustments to it like changing it to gradual for example
does not improve the situation at all it just creates kind of a
hazy smear behind whatever you move around but the real test is not how it
does moving the mouse around in steam but rather how it handles actual games
okay so shadow of the tomb raider is almost ready to go which means we can
talk about HDR gameplay now but first
well let's talk about HDR content consumption so here's a video that was
shot in HDR from our buddy austin evans i'm just gonna switch us over to yep
there we go 4k HDR does it work
uh yeah it definitely works so it's vasa
HDR 1000 certified which means it has to be able to do a thousand nits peak
brightness in a small area or as a single flash across the whole screen and
600 nits sustained but ASUS says it can actually do 750 nits sustained now
as far as just consuming content on it goes i gotta say the full array local
dimming did not bother me at all as long as i'm
viewing it from directly in front if you go off axis
yeah that's a more challenging scenario and i can definitely see the halos but
straight on it actually looks
really damn good so this is fascinating i was having a game launching issue and
i wanted to force close steam
and check this out we're getting wicked fringing now and it looks like
it's actually related to HDR so even though i'm running four to two here we
go 12 bit 144 hertz even i bet if i even
crank it to 200 hertz we get no fringing without HDR unless we
move it around see there you go you got to move it around to have any
effect whatsoever so this is it first time
gaming in HDR at home 200 hertz man that's butter smooth the
sunlight looks really really natural
compared to what you'd be accustomed to seeing in
games and even in the spots where we've got
like a pretty significant contrast between a sunlight reflection and then
something dark underneath it i'm not really getting
a noticeable halo or fringe around it
that looks really sharp doesn't it one thing i'd like to try though is dialing
it back to 144 hertz no chroma sub sampling so we're back at four four four
ten bit color honestly i wouldn't say there's anything
immediately noticeable this game does look really really good in HDR though so
i could actually see myself dialing back the maximum refresh rate for games that
are all about the visuals but
there are also situations where i wouldn't want to compromise on that
at all and i'd be willing to go to you know
8-bit or 4-2-2 sub-sampling or whatever the case
may be and that's something like uh like a pixel precision you know platformer
like super meat boy oh okay literally
yeah he's a super boy i don't know no questions video game stuff
i gotta say i could get used to playing a game like this at 200 hertz
nope this is driving me crazy it's driving me crazy brandon but as for my
last game test actually the game that i started this entire personal rig update
over over land i don't have an issue but this
is the first game that we've tried today where the full array local dimming is
noticeable when i'm mousing over the water and i would
find that distracting so
yeah this is the first situation where i would probably find myself wanting to go
in and turn that off and i guess that's actually a perfect place to summarize my
thoughts on this display it's an incredible piece of technology i hadn't
even mentioned this yet but we validated ASUS's included color calibration report
with delta ease of two or less making it not just great for gaming but also
content consumption and even content creation but both its greatest strength
and its greatest weakness is the incredible degree of customization
that it allows so you can decide what
color depth you want or whether you want chroma sub sampling or whether you want
to trade off more refresh rate or less refresh rate
or you want to run HDR or no HDR do you want to have um full array local dimming
on or off if you're not using HDR and you can dial in exactly the experience
you want on a per game basis
but it also means that you have to have a pretty decent level of understanding
of all the dials and knobs that are at your fingertips
now for me personally there's no going back at this point it's
just that if you're in the market for one of these make sure you set aside maybe a couple
hours to do some light reading in order to fully understand how to get the most
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