here at Linus tech tips we know we are occasionally
a little late to the party for example uploading videos about a new apple
product days after the initial coverage wave has come and gone you know it is
what it is we try whatever get off my back
but not today no what i'm showing you guys today
is not stale at all in fact
i don't think i'd even describe it as ripe yet i mean look
it doesn't even have room in the box for the power adapter it's just
it's just separate this
is the first look at the full 4k 120 kit
but what's that and where did it come from
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okay so first things first i gotta say i'm a little unnerved by this box
because there is no friggin way
that a monitor and a stand for a monitor
are fitting in here and like look at this
we got like a handwritten note here take care
made by hand and then we've got the name
of the guy aziz who made it so this is z's from z's works
oh boy wow what the heck
this thing is just like a completely naked panel and
oh my gosh there's just like exposed pcbs on the
back there's no stand no plastic housing um
too it's credit okay to its credit it does have a vase amount here but
no way okay there's only three there's only
three mounting points here um
there we go i i got it and i oh this is
i think i found the nut okay so we've got it mounted now we just
used this um random monitor ARM that we
found and look at this weird stuff we got
going on here so this right here
is a jtag programmer for updating the
firmware of and debugging the main chip
and this like taped on doodad here is
actually a usb to serial adapter for debugging
everything else the monitor comes with a
heap of technical documentation to help
you do all of these things and you can even reprogram the led backlight driver
if that tickles your pickle okay so it's
probably clear to most of you by now that the reason
this thing is here in our shop is clearly nothing to do with how polished
and finished it is as a product it's because it's the first
monitor to reach our lab that runs at
3840 by 2160 4k
at 120 hertz that's right you gamers can have your
cake and eat it too with high resolution
and high refresh rate but how did a small fish like
aziz pull this off before the big dogs like
ASUS and acer who showed off their high refresh rate displays at ces this year
a quick implementation of the displayport 1.4 standard and that is a
negatory general uh because check this out we've actually got two
DisplayPort inputs here one right there
and one right there so i guess let's
start by firing it up with just one connected
um
there uh okay so check this out there's
no normal on-screen display but
it does have these completely unlabeled
buttons up here that hold on a minute
is this thing completely held on by one screw at the top
okay so as i was saying it has these unlabeled buttons that helpfully
come with this handwritten user guide to
tell me what they're for so there's power oh so oh sorry no power is labeled
so why don't we start with that one we'll press it
wow that turns on really quickly okay so
the next two are for adjusting brightness okay so
technically there's a label there there's a plus and a minus oh yeah you're doing pretty well here and then
there's other ones for switching between a bunch of different edid profiles for
reported resolution and refresh rate starting with
540p at
480 hertz and
wow this looks pretty crap um
i mean it it has like an interlaced look
to it and quite honestly like in motion
even the tn pixels can't switch fast enough to avoid having like a a purple
trail behind black objects but boy does that ever feel
butter smooth wow then the next switch is 720p at up to
300 hertz which is still really darn smooth
and is at least i can tell if it's a ct
or a terrorist at this resolution compared to 540p the next one is 1080p
at up to 240 hertz and i can see how
this feature would be useful when you look at how quickly it switches modes if
you're the kind of person who often finds yourself dialing back the
resolution to get more FPS out of games like cs go
and then wants to turn up the resolution for sightseeing games like uh
civilization vi or skyrim i mean these buttons really do make switching super
easy or maybe it's dumb let us know in the comments if you think you would
actually use these or not
so okay here we are 1080p 240 hertz
pretty sick but it's not the native resolution so
you're dealing with interpolation and there are already monitors that are
actually designed to run at that resolution and that refresh rate
so then let's get finally to good old-fashioned
4k 60 hertz and then
um okay so we were expecting 4k 120 hertz here
but we got a visual demonstration of the limits
of displayport 1.2 it just can't push that much data
so instead it has to compromise
let's plug in a second displayport cable
well that didn't happen in any of our testing before we go to film
you can see the right side of the screen is a little bit uh wonka but
we have still had for the first time the
experience of 120 hertz gaming at 4k
resolution and given that we've got this game running at about 150 to 200 FPS
it is definitely a thing to behold now
is this the optimal situation with the whole thing going on with the uh
flickering on the right hand side of the screen and all that
obviously not but i guess velo learned a valuable
lesson about shipping
display controllers that literally have unstable
pinned onto the back of them so in summary then
aside from this glitchiness right when we go to film
this works but how do you buy one
the answer is you don't yet
and you may never be looking at a traditional
finished monitor from this works
their special sauce is in the development that they're doing on custom
electronics and the concept that they want to crowdfund is the idea of diy
enthusiasts being able to buy their module and slap
it onto an existing panel whether through a bundle from zeesworks or off
ebay or whatever there will always be drawbacks
to an approach like this the calibration and display tuning that
goes on with a finished product was clearly not present on our intellux
m280dj dash l30 and you won't get fancy
features like g-sync anytime soon but
zswork has tested other options like a 39-inch mba panel and they say it works
pretty similarly and they're also expecting costs for diy monitor
solutions like this to be hundreds of dollars cheaper than 120 hertz 4k gaming
monitors from traditional companies so yay or nay
diy mix and match monitors and electronics
whatever you guys say down in the comments below i know i'll be watching
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