Get on my level. - The 147" Surround Monitor Experience
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,246 words · ~11 min read
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hello and welcome to the first and possibly
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the final installment of what i'm calling james
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tries stuff for the first time today i'm going to use whatever tools i can find
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just laying around to make the most pointless pc gaming setup possible
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hey look what are these doing here three 49-inch
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32x9 gaming monitors each one of these
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is designed to be an elegant stand-alone solution for achieving both the
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productivity and gaming benefits usually reserved for double or even triple
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monitor setups but hey i'm super naive why not connect
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all three of them to create a 180 degree
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semicircle of pixel paradise
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builds dot gg is at it again with the stock cooling showdown up to four
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thousand dollars and hardware prizes are up for grabs for the most highly voted
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systems and for people who simply vote click the link below to join
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welcome back step one is to get a computer particularly one that has
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enough video out ports to connect one to one to each of your three monitors now
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it is possible to go from one DisplayPort to like a hub where you
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split off to other displayport cables that might be possible depending on the
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resolution of your monitors but it's always better to have a dedicated cable
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especially considering that displayport is pretty janky at the best of times
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i'm also using the highest quality cables that i could find because the
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displayport spec actually is only built around
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a cable length of 3 meters which is about
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precisely 9.8 feet so if you're going to go beyond that
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which you may well do considering that if you're using monitors this wide end
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to end they're like 10 feet if you need to go beyond 9.8 feet with a
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displayport cable the longer the cable the higher quality they should be for
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our computer we're going to be using a Corsair one pro
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because it has an rtx 2080 ti inside
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which i know is capable of pushing all the pixels i need to these giant
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displays so that's just one less thing to screw me over the next thing you need
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is a bunch of monitors now ideally you would be using three identical monitors
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at least with the same resolution and the same aspect ratio but it does
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help if they're actually the same naked model because then they're gonna have the same sync polarity and more uniform
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colors across all of it we don't have that here today what we have although
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these are each of them 32 by 9 49-inch monitors
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there are three different brands we've got an lg a dell
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and a samsung behind me the samsung has a resolution of 3840 by
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1080 and a refresh rate of 144 hertz
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while the other two although they do share the same lg made panel which is a
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bonus they have a resolution of 5120 by 1440
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and a refresh rate of 60 hertz so we
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we're just gonna have to find out if this mishmash
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screws us in the end the first thing i'm noticing here is that
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this is kind of stupid
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these are already so wide that i don't know if it would be
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practical for basically anybody's workflow to have them arranged like this
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the other thing i'm thinking about here is the keyboard and mouse okay if i'm over
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here it's a little awkward especially if these were turned in more and i was more
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surrounded it would be a little weird to be typing over here and cranking my neck
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this way i got an idea
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okay so i found some scraps
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extruded aluminum that we had from 16k gaming and i've never used this stuff
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before but alex said it's pretty easy to work with
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yeah okay now for the ps3 resistance
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that's more like it now that our setup is completely ridiculous let's try
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actually gaming follow me okay so you'll see we're only using one
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third of our potential girth here so that's no good go into the settings the
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resolution 5120 by 1440 is the resolution of one of these if i go into
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windowed mode nope no option to do that
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okay i think it's time we opened the NVIDIA control panel okay so the point
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of surround is to make your computer think that you have just one monitor
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with one resolution okay let's play it safe and start with just two of our
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monitors one by two we'll pick the lg
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and the dell so 10 240 pixels
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that's the width of those two screens it's created one combined resolution
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because it's gonna treat it like it's one monitor
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very cool so let's see if we can get it to do that with all three monitors
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we're gonna change our topology to one by three
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select every monitor including the samsung okay so i was expecting
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what like twelve thousand this is fifty seven sixty by ten eighty
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uh if i go to calculator and divide that by three monitors
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1920. it's treating this like each one of these is 1920 by 1080.
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i think it's because you're not allowed to mix and match
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resolutions so
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i mean we can try this wow
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stretch city okay this is kind of cool and immersive um
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it's not working properly but
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i don't think it's because of the 1920
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surround error thing i think it's because this game is just not meant to
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do this see how it gets really stretched out on the sides like that car
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and the car looks really close when i go like this it looks a lot farther away
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and that's because this game is rendering with only one camera position
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games that are meant to be played like this they're going to render from multiple camera positions and then the
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result is gonna be that teammates don't look like that
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oh boy good god
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good gravy can i knife people in this game
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okay okay let's get out of here what if
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i forced all these to be the same resolution so
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one way i could do that which would suck would be to just run my high-res ones at
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a lower res so i'd run them all at 38.40
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by 1080. that's not that cool
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because why did i buy or have sent to this company higher res
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monitors so instead we're going to try to super sample the
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low res one to render as though it is
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5120 by 1440. there are some drawbacks
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even if you can get surround to work like let's say i had monitors that were
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all the same and surround worked for me and it was awesome there's still some drawbacks because it
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makes it seem like it's all one monitor which is not ideal when you're not
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gaming if i'm just using my desktop and it's treated like one monitor then when
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i go to maximize one of my Windows for example you're gonna have like a Windows
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explorer window that's just like
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eight feet of white and it's not easy
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to just place a window on only one monitor for example
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and like your clock's going to be way over there while your Windows start menu
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is way over there for that reason a lot of people who game
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with surround on will actually turn it off when they're not gaming and then
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turn it back on when they go to game again which sucks because it actually takes
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anywhere between one and five minutes to get it all configured every time now a
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lot of these problems can be mitigated or outright solved by using software
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like ultraman or display fusion which is way better because then you can just
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stay in surround mode all the time and not have to go back into the display
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settings like i have to right now and move stuff around okay let's see if this
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worked i go into my Windows display settings
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i now have a new resolution for my crappy monitor my crappy thousand
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dollar awesome monitor so now we're gonna go back into surround
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and see if we can get the coveted 15 360
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horizontal pixel resolution that we were looking for no
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ah
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there's just no there's no making it work you can't even trick it but who
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cares because we still might be able to get the result we want sure it's not
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going to be exclusive full screen in our games we'll take a slight performance
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hit but we can still have lots of fun so let's try some other games that are
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designed to be used in setups like this i'm going to look at
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a list of games that are actually known
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to work with widescreen far cry 5 we have that one this intro sequence is a
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far cry from being enjoyable options video
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aspect ratio custom window mode
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windowed all the way all the way
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oh whoa no
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no okay now i think i'm going to try just
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running the benchmark because i don't want to get caught in the 20 minutes of cutscenes this game starts with
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nice nice those hay bales aren't really even
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stretched yeah they're closer but it's not super distorted
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things look proportional this is pretty dank i don't have to look
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over there but having it there is more immersive all right enough far cry now i
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want to try a racing game naturally i heard that project cars 2 is pretty
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good for this kind of thing so options
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holy cow look at this i don't even have to go into video there's a button
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specifically saying triple screen configure your settings to match your
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triple screen setup hell yeah triple screen spanning
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check these are probably wrong but i'm gonna say that's fine
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okay and again
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you can see on the text of toyota it's not stretched out right
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okay this is pretty sweet oh look one hand wow man that rear view
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mirror is like the same size as my actual rear view mirror in my car this
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is like almost life-size this is pretty cool
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and just like real life i go the wrong way okay this was a pretty stupid setup
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but i still learned a few things number one if you're into
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widescreen surround gaming then make sure that the games you want to play
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actually support it because it really comes down to the games more than
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anything if you're into racing games and flight sims then you're probably good to go and
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i think more and more regular mainstream shooter type games
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are supporting it because 21x9 monitors are more mainstream but this aspect
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ratio is still kind of rare and then getting three of them is dumb number two make
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sure all of your monitors are the same resolution and aspect ratio because that
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caused headaches like we just have fewer options because we have the setup that
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we do and number three is this worth it
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this particular setup with these monitors is this the good way to go i
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don't think so because first of all it's super expensive yes
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it's more immersive but for the cost like this is 4 500 worth of monitors
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is it really that much more immersive than just having i don't know one of
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them they don't really have a very tight curve that's an 1800 r curve one if you
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had three monitors this aspect ratio that had 1800 r curves then it would be
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a tighter circle around you but hey if it's all about dick measuring then this
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gives you a huge dick so
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