I'm in GAMER Heaven - HP EmperiumX 65 Gaming TV Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,444 words · ~12 min read
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pc gaming from the couch in many ways it's the holy grail but it takes a few
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special ingredients to make it work bringing your computer into the living
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room well that's easy enough and these days there are plenty of powerful small
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form factor machines that look perfectly at home in your entertainment unit
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then there's the wireless controls well fortunately cordless peripherals have
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made huge performance and battery gains in recent years and now they fit nicely
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inside these cushioned lap boards
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sorry couchwood and then finally there's the tv which is
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probably 4k and definitely bigger than your gaming monitor
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but usually only 60 hertz and bound to
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suffer from dog slow input leg
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so yeah the tv is basically always the
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weakest link when it comes to living room pc gaming setups
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or is it this right here is the hp omen x
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imperium 65 the first production bfgd or
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big format gaming display to reach our studio but could it possibly be worth
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the diaper filling price of 5
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000 dollars
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the lienly 011d has just been given a
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facelift by razer now compatible with razer chroma devices it also comes with
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customizable underglow powered by razer synapse 3. click the link below to get a
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chance to win one for yourself if you found yourself salivating over our
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review of the 4k 144 hertz ASUS pg27uq
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gaming monitor last summer then the tl dr is this
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this puppy here is just about as balling
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as that two thousand dollar panty butter was but
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at over four times the surface area
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it's pretty much the tv we have always wanted like i am already trying to
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figure out how to get this video done as quickly as i possibly can so that i can
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just take it home and play games on it by myself in a dark room for all time
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why you might ask well because the imperium 65 like all bfgds right now is
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guaranteed to have a laundry list of vital stats including 4k resolution
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g-sync ultimate which means not only g-sync but also HDR a 120 hertz native
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refresh rate ultra low input leg and
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as a total bonus a built-in NVIDIA shield tv
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i mean i already have one of those but like hey
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values value and those things are worth like 180 bucks on their own
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so then let's go through each of these points in finer detail starting with
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appropriately resolution it's 3840 by
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2160 uhd so you can get inside of two
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feet from this thing before you start seeing the individual pixels now it's
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thick by modern tv standards but that's for good reason it uses a direct rather
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than edge led backlight with full array local dimming across
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384 zones which means they're just under five square inches each and they managed
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to sustain brightness on this thing of 750 nits with peak brightness of 1 000
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nits earning this puppy the display HDR 1000 certification
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along with that of course comes great colors so it's an 8-bit plus frc panel
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but in our tests it achieved over 94
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of the dci p3 color space and it's got
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professional grade color accuracy right out of the box
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also while they are by no means
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OLED level the blacks are pretty deep
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because it uses a va panel so if you have black bars on your content it's not
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nearly as distracting as it might be on an ips type display
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with that said for strictly movie watching the imperium 65 was never going
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to be a great value so let's talk gaming
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now this is far from the only tv with a 120 hertz refresh rate but
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the difference is that it's real like
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the actual screen refreshes at full 4k
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resolution 120 times per second no dropping down to
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1080p no frame interpolation bs and it
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can actually even be overclocked to 144
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hertz by exposing the option through the on-screen display
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we were able to get a stable overclock with no problems and the experience is
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just buttery smooth it's got all the modern
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g-sync features like support for windowed mode and fast sync vsync and no
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sync options for if you somehow get FPS
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higher than the display's maximum refresh rate which would take some
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serious hardware at 4k res at this point in time
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one of the biggest drags about gaming on a conventional tv though is something
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that you won't find on the spec sheet input lag
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that little delay between moving the mouse and seeing the action on the
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screen now there are plenty of tvs out there
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with input lag around the 50 60 or even
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70 millisecond mark which is pretty bad since 30 milliseconds is what would be
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considered noticeable as for this unit
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honestly it feels like a gaming monitor now we measured lag times of about 30 to
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35 milliseconds but keep in mind that our manner of measuring now measures the
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delay of the entire chain from mouse to
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pc to game engine to display electronics to pixel response times so the display
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leg is lower than our measurements show now we do have some tools on the way
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that should help us get more accurate results and i plan on doing a follow-up
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video where i actually bring one of these puppies home and
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decide for good what's going to live in my living room but for now let me just
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say it this way this tv feels responsive
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af but everything we've said so far is going to be the same for all of the
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NVIDIA bfgds that are coming out what makes hp's offering different
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to be frank not a lot it's mostly just down to the
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physical design which in my opinion is kind of a mixed bag one of my favorite
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things about this display is the little light bar that they put by the i o isn't
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that awesome you just wave your hands and it lights up
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this might seem trivial but it can be really hard to plug in a cable
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especially with your tv mounted tightly against the wall and like trying to hold
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your phone as a flashlight in your mouth rarely improves the situation speaking
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of wall mounting this set is also interesting because it comes with a
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sound bar and offers two different ways of standing it up
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the first way is to attach these beefy matte black legs to the tv and then
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according to the frustratingly brief instructions just kind of
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slide the sound bar underneath i guess
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now it's kind of inconsequential but this method felt kind of weird because
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we weren't actually attaching the sound bar to the tv even though they come
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together in the box so then if you want to do that then you use
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method number two where you don't use the legs and instead you mount these
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brackets to the soundbar first and then everything to the bottom of the display
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which by the way takes forever because you can't just lay the display down on
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the table like the instructions say because the bloody sound bar is thicker
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than the display meaning that you will cross thread the screws which you can
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barely turn because the allen key doesn't anyway look it doesn't matter we
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got it done but if all that sounded like it's not
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worth the hassle then mission accomplished i guess because
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don't set it up this way unless you're going to wall mount it because it's
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tippy to the point of being very dangerous like this thing is puppy
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crushingly heavy on the subject of wall mounting though
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that works great and i was very pleased to see a standard face amount with no
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curvature and no nonsense but don't expect to get that sexy
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flush mount look because this tv as i alluded to before is really thick and
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then again the sound bar makes it jut out even more than it absolutely has to
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yeah you know what the the sound bar overall it's just kind
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of a contentious issue for me so on the one hand it is nice that a 5 000 tv
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comes with speakers that are at least halfway decent though to be clear not
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amazing but on the other hand i mean isn't it fair to assume that most people
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who are in the market for a 5 000 display
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also have money for decent speakers
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so i guess that's a tidy transition into the imperium 65's weak points and the
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first one is a real doozy screen
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uniformity the edges and particularly
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the corners have this sepia toned gramosatic almost
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dirty look to them when you're looking at white or a bright background now in
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fairness i wouldn't notice it in a game where i'm typically pretty focused on
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the crosshair right in front of me but once you see it it's hard to unsee it if
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you're doing something like web browsing or really anything that's light colored
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also there's some pretty noticeable vertical banding going on and these
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things contributed to while using it just this feeling of
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having bought an oversized gaming monitor versus a
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premium television and it gets worse
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one of the biggest improvements to tvs in the last few years has been their
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nearly perfect off-axis viewing experience at least to a degree
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pun intended and the bfgd falls well
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short of what i would consider to be acceptable for a large living room
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viewing experience where someone like even on a couch like the one i'm sitting
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here on right now someone is gonna end up either off on
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the side or on a beanbag chair over there and they are not gonna have as
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good an experience both color and contrast are affected but
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it's the banding and the halos around bright objects because of the local
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dimming that are truly distracting now
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they get better if you turn the local dimming off
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but like that's not what i want to do when i'm gaming or watching a movie in
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HDR on my 5 000 display
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and finally keep in mind that like anything using displayport 1.4 running
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4k at 144 hertz comes with the trade-off of chroma 422 sub sampling rather than
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444 which we discussed in more detail in our pg27uq review
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also the screen takes a good 10 to 12 seconds to turn on
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woof and when it comes to HDR support the
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imperium does not support dolby vision instead only offering HDR 10 which
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hp somehow thinks can be appropriately described as
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one of the most ambitious HDR standards
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yeah okay in conclusion then
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this display is kick-ass and i really
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really want to play i want to play with it and then and then clean it and tuck
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it in at night and the thing is that i already have it it's
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here and hp sent it to me to review so then yeah if you're a billionaire you
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should go get one right now for your dedicated gaming salon
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but i just have a harder time recommending this to anyone for whom
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five thousand dollars is a stretch and here are the reasons
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number one while i've been referring to it as a tv it isn't strictly speaking
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a tv it's actually missing some tv features like for example a tv tuner
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i don't personally consider that a big deal because i don't remember when the
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last time anyone used their tvs onboard tuner was but it's an important enough a
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distinction that hp sent us an irate email because we kept calling it a tv
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and they were like no it's a display so fine i'm mentioning it there you go
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two it's really tough to push aaa games past
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about 70 FPS at 4k and the thing is if you're not going to
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game at either 4k or 120 hertz or more
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specifically both of them then you might as well save yourself
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some cash with a freesync 120hz 1080p tv
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then perhaps most importantly three
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within the next year we're going to see a lot of the gaming features that make
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the imperium so great start to appear in
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mainstream tvs sets with HDMI 2.1 are
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due out this year that means 4k 120
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hertz and again with freesync support so
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then as long as they have low input lag and a fair number of tvs out there do
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now they'll probably offer up a very similar gaming experience compared to
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the bfgd but they could be as much as a few
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thousand dollars cheaper
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so this was an amazing product concept
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that addressed a huge gap in the market when
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NVIDIA unveiled it at ces 2018.
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