Red Magic makes phones, but can they make a gaming monitor?
Normally, we get these things right out of the box real quick, but this box is actually pretty neat,
so we're gonna take a look at it. First of all, I'd like to point out, it is a mini LED gaming monitor, 27 inch,
if that wasn't clear. It's got G-moo-idge, whatever that might be,
bunch of specs here, and then on the side here, we've got the Red Magic logo.
We got this cool black and white silver dude coming out of the monitor on the box,
and then on the bottom, win more games.
That's pretty good. It actually is a pretty decent display.
It's 4K, not 60, but 160.
So like 4K is finally seeing some pretty high refresh rates
at reasonable prices, which we'll get to later.
There we go. Bada bing, bada boom. We have a power cable, external power source
for those of you who really crave that. All right, it's not G-moo-idge,
it's G-m001J, looks to be the product name.
And inside this bag here, we got a bunch of cables.
The USB-B cable, we got a Type-C cable.
We'll get to the IO later, but this does have a 90 watt power delivery
on the USB-C cable. Got our HDMI cable, probably 2.1, does it say on here?
Oh my lanta, it does, signal cable ZH HDMI 2.1.
We got our DisplayPort cable, 1.4, but you're gonna need this if you wanna do 4K 160.
We've got our user manual for the G-m001J.
It's reporting some pretty decent numbers with a really low average Delta E.
Based on what I've heard, I don't quite believe that, but it is pretty good. So we'll get to that later on.
Here's our stand. This is beefy, and I've never seen one that's this big.
So I'm excited. And then we got the other part of our stand, the bottom.
One nice note, we've got the two column support, so this thing's going nowhere.
Just like Spider-Man. Okay, so there's a cable cover in here. We just take this off, so you just pop it up, take it off.
Run your cables through the side right here,
and then you, there you go.
That's actually pretty good. And we've got our panel in the box.
I love the back of this thing. It's a cool triangle with, I'm hoping RGB, but we'll see.
Wow. Oh, that's not too bad.
It's like seven kilos when the stand is on.
I figured this out. It's probably a headphone hanger.
I really don't know what else you would use this for. And I'll be honest, I don't like that it's behind the monitor
instead of on the sides, because I don't want to like, reach around to put my headphones away.
But I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Aside from that, I want to talk about the design because they call it Robo-Aesthetic Hardcore Attack.
Now, to me, it just looks like a monitor.
I admit, I do like the cool triangle on the back,
but I don't really get where the Robo-Aesthetic is coming into.
That cable cover comes off way too easily, by the way. I don't know, maybe it's just me,
but be careful if you're handling this thing. But let's talk about all the other stuff we want to see,
like, wow.
Okay, how to adjust? Wow.
One thing I don't like is the chin. Especially now that I'm feeling it,
there's this huge gap here, and there's this giant chin here. I don't know why that is there.
Maybe there's an IR remote or something, but there was one in the box, so I don't know what it's for.
We'll find out later. Maybe it's for the OSD or something like that. But what I love is, not once,
but both ways, baby.
You might not think that's a big feature, but some monitors can only pivot one way.
And if you really, especially with the chin on the bottom
here, if you want to make this vertical someday, you really want to line everything up nicely.
Imagine if your monitor's here and you've got to match this chin bar
with your other monitor, it's going to look bad. So thankfully, you just go the other way.
Yeah, I really don't like this weird crevice that's going on here.
I don't know if that's where all the IO is or something, but it just feels kind of janky.
And then I don't like the chin. I know I mentioned that already, but I really don't like the chin.
Otherwise, it seems fine. We've read some reviews, because this is out already,
and some people online are complaining about the build quality and all that. I'm not going to say it's like amazing or anything,
but I don't think it's that bad. Although this top cap is kind of missing.
I don't know if it just got lost in Labs or what, but we don't have ours.
As for IO, we've got a couple of USB-A ports, USB-B, USB-C with 90 watt power delivery and DisplayPort,
as well as DP 1.4 right next to it,
two HDMI 2.1s, headphone jack, and a power connector.
I've complained in the past about plugging things in from the bottom and how I like how LG and Corsair do it,
where you just plug it straight into the back. And I'm going to complain about it here, especially,
because yeah, it's got this whole cover thing, and it's going to be a massive headache
to try to get cables in and out of there. Don't like it.
My inner correction, this is on a cable cover, so you can take this on or off.
I still don't really like it, because it's hard to get back on.
Get on there cable cover. Yo, check it out.
It's doing it. It's got RGB, and you know what? The cool thing is, it's not just like LEDs that shine.
It's actually covered in something. It looks pretty cool, but it's a little dim.
We'll see in a second once I turn it around if it splashes off the back wall very well.
Other than that, I don't know if I'm crazy about the segmentation on the pattern here.
I kind of would prefer if this was just one giant diffused light source,
but you know, to each their own, maybe someone out there likes it. I still don't really get what the chin is for,
other than maybe a handle to pull the monitor down.
On the back, we've got a navigation nipple for the OSD.
Out of the box, it'll come calibrated for SRGB, DCI-P3, and Adobe RGB, which is pretty handy.
So on most monitors, you press the button
to go into the menu, or you press the button
to at the very least action on whatever you're on in the menu.
With this, it just turns it off, and that feels really bad.
I'm gonna try really hard to not do that again, but there's a good chance it's gonna happen, so okay.
So this is just a navigation, that's good. Otherwise, this looks like a pretty standard OSD.
You can change the color temperature, hue, saturation, brightness, all that.
One thing that we wanted to talk about is that this doesn't actually get that dim.
And so while the vast majority of you won't care about that,
most people use their monitors at like at least 50% brightness, if not max,
and they want brighter is better. But some people, especially like ones
who are sensitive to light, wanna keep their monitors dim.
Or if they live in a cave, or if they're like me and they're in the basement with all the blinds closed
and everything, they want it a little dimmer. You can't do that with this one.
The lowest this monitor is going to get is 130 nits,
which is kinda wild. You wanna see at least 50 to 60.
It's got 1152 local dimming zones, which is fantastic on a screen this size, only 27 inches.
The RGB is not doing anything on the back of this wall.
So don't expect it to like light up the back of your monitor or your gaming station or anything like that.
Now with 160 Hertz, you're usually gonna have a pretty smooth experience.
As for response time, we measured about 5.5 milliseconds.
We recommend not turning on any overdrive. One cool thing I'm noticing as I'm watching the frogs
go across here, is you can really see the local dimming,
try to do its magic. I'm seeing a ton of flickering all up in here,
as the white frog is passing across this gray background.
It's not a super pronounced effect, but it's a bit of strobing that might bother some people
depending on the game they're playing. This is just an IPS panel, but it's not bad.
There's no like major trails on any of the frogs.
Just a kinda like small blur on the back of them, which is pretty standard.
One thing to note is you probably want to keep variable refresh rate turned on, because with it off,
we actually noticed that there was more latency. But it went from 3.8 to 9.8,
introducing about six extra milliseconds of latency. It's especially weird, because the local dimming
isn't adding latency either. We tested with it both on and off. So just keep VRR on.
One of the problems with HDR with this monitor, and often with mini LED in general,
is while it has all these dimming zones, because it's trying to fight bloom,
it has trouble getting super bright in the 1% window screen.
So what you end up with is it'll do crazy, full bright,
but then when you get to the 1%, 5%, 10% Windows, like those pinpoints of brightness,
it's more like 500, 600 nits, which is okay, it's still bright,
and HDR with local dimming is still going to look a lot better than HDR without local dimming
or SDR content in general. But it's a key feature that OLED still wins in.
For example, in this display, we measured a 1% window of 640 nits,
and then in HDR, full screen brightness went all the way up to 1575 nits,
which is pretty crazy. I can't see much blooming, just when I'm watching content on here.
Like that's one thing I'd like to point out. Oh, no, you can see it.
When my mouse is over a black spot, you can see it bloom.
However, with over 1,100 zones, it means that that blooming is gonna be very minimal.
So instead of trying to light up a square, you know, like this big,
it's gonna be lighting up one like this big, and so that bloom is gonna be much less pronounced
and it would be on a monitor with, say, 500 zones.
I can make it out in person just barely. Those 1,100 plus zones are really putting in some work,
but if I kind of just, you see how it gets a little bit wider around the crosshair?
It's definitely noticeable in person, but it is pretty minor.
Honestly, everything looks okay. I can definitely tell that it's an IPS panel.
The whole thing looks a little bit washed out compared to more high contrast displays like OLED
or even VA to be frank.
It doesn't look bad necessarily. It's just once you get used to a certain thing,
nothing else looks as good. That being said, the colors pop.
They're pretty vibrant. The green, especially, that was showing up right there.
I really like these, the blue outline for the glory kill stuff.
Looks great. Honestly, it's okay. I'm not like crazy sold on this thing.
I also think that 4K is just kind of wild. Like this is doom eternal.
The game is pretty old. Yeah, we're getting 200 plus FPS, an ultra nightmare,
but it's also doom eternal. Nothing else has come out that's like this optimized.
The thing about this monitor though is it's 4K, 160,
color accurate, mini LED, 1152 dimming zones.
It's a lot of features and it's 869, 769 right now on sale.
It's really hard for me to recommend something like this at this price range because when you go up
to about a thousand dollars, you get the LG 240 Hertz OLED.
It's only 1440p. I get it.
However, gaming at 4K is not easy.
So unless you've got like a 3090 at least, if not a 4090, good luck getting proper frame rates
on today's games that keep coming out unoptimized. At the sale price, it's a bit more enticing,
but if this thing is only MSRP, I just can't really recommend it, unfortunately.
Either save up just a little bit more and get the LG or save money
and get a $400, $500, 1440p gaming monitor.
I think you're better off. This is ShortCircuit. I'm Bluf.
This is the Red Magic 4K gaming monitor and it's pretty cool.
If you wanna check out another pretty cool monitor,
check out the Alienware, 500 Hertz. Pretty fast.