LG 34UM67 Ultrawide FreeSync Monitor
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,818 words · ~9 min read
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Ultrawide monitors. This is not the first one I've seen, but it is the first
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I've seen that targets gamers so directly. Welcome to my video of the LG
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34UM67. Fractal Design listens and the Define R5 case was made with feedback
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from you, the community. So, click my face to learn more about that and give
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your feedback. So, let's start by having a look at her physically. H if you
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watched my video on the 34UM95 just under a year ago, you
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already know pretty much how this story goes. The stand is see-through, which is
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neat, but it's otherwise subpar since only its tilt and angle can be adjusted
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without removing and replacing the two screws that let you change the height a
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grand total of like an inch. And there's some unfortunate stuff at the back as
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well. That glossy plastic is going to do what glossy plastic does best. Although
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we might have an idea for a solution, so make sure that you're subscribed for
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that video. And while the standard vasa mount and included sticker to protect
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the back of your monitor are welcome sites, folks who want to wall mount this
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puppy will need to buy lowprofile angled connectors for anything but the second
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HDMI input. So, the audio pass through HDMI 1, DVI or DisplayPort ports. No
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USB hub back here. Something I would have liked to see on such an expensive
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display as well. Moving around to the front, things get quite a bit better in
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a hurry. The bezel around the matte anti-glare coated 2560x 1080 75 Hz IPS
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panel is super slim, and LG's joystick for navigating the onscreen menu is
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present. And what an onscreen menu it
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is. It lacks an sRGB color profile, even
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though 99% sRGB coverage is a selling point on the monitor's web page for some
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reason. But if you've got a calibration tool, the six-axis color adjustments
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will let you take care of that easily. And just about anything else, you can
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set it to six bit or 8 bit color, adjust pixel response times, although as usual,
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I found medium was the best compromise and much better than older IPS panels.
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By the way, you can tinker with their black stabilizer feature, which is
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similar to Ben Q's black equalizer, a contrast reducing effect that makes it
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easier to see objects in shadows in games without washing out all of the
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colors on screen. You can use any of the preconfigured gaming modes that monkey
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around with color, gamma, and sharpness, or you can make your own that you can
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switch to by pressing up on the joystick twice. And then you can enable and
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disable a couple of LG's other killer features for the 34UMM67 as well. The
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first is DAZ or dynamic action sync.
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This one is pretty simple. It's designed to reduce display lag or the time
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between the monitor receiving a frame and displaying it on the screen.
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Usually, this feature is labeled on TVs as a game mode or similar and results in
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dramatically worse image quality thanks to less pixel processing. But in the
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case of the 34UMM67, I can't find any reason with my
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bare eyes to turn it off. It looked exactly the same to me. And the second
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killer app, compliance with the optional adaptive sync portion of the Display
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Port 1.2A standard and AMD free sync
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certification. This monitor supports dynamic refresh rate gaming where your
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supported system can effectively tell the monitor when to refresh the image
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eliminating the issues associated with VSYNC on. So that is stuttering and lag
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and VSYNC off that tearing effect where
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there seems to be a horizontal line through the image where there's half of
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one frame and half of the next one on the screen at the same time. There are
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some caveats here though. In addition to a compliant display, you'll need a
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supported AMD dedicated or onboard graphics solution. You'll need a display
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port cable, curiously not included in the box. And you'll need a Freync
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compatible driver. So, I used a beta 1 provided by AMD for my evaluation of
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this monitor. Yes, friends, NVIDIA graphics card owners will not be able to
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take advantage of the dynamic refresh rate of this monitor unless NVIDIA
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decides to go down the DP1.2A open standard route sometime in the future.
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instead of asking monitor vendors to buy their own G-Sync scaler chip, something
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that at this time is quite expensive and only supports DisplayPort input, but
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NVIDIA claims will have other advantages down the line. We can talk about that
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when that comes, but first, let's talk about the usage experience of this
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monitor. I still love ultrawide for productivity, but I'm also still not
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super stoked on 2560x 1080 for that
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particular use case. I found myself frustrated with the number of vertical
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pixels, scrolling a lot, the same way that I always was way back in the day of
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the dinosaurs when 16x10 monitors went out of fashion to be replaced by 16x9
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1080p monitors. And this issue if for me
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is made worse by the size of this display thanks to its IPS panel.
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Contrast, color vibrancy, and viewing angles are non-issues. But with pixel
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density this low, even with no scaling,
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text looks abominable and no amount of
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low blue light reading modes made it feel comfortable for me to use compared
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to its 3440x440 brethren, also from LG. But I
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understand why LG did it this way. They didn't really have a choice. From the
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marketing, this is a gaming monitor first and productivity monitor second.
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And 3440x440 is just about 80% more pixels
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than 2560x 1080, which might make graphics card companies happy with all
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the video cards they'll be selling just so folks can play games at native res,
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but might not thrill gamers too much. And in games, the pixel density bothers
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me a lot less. I don't find anti-aliasing unnecessary like I did
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with Dell's 5K monitor, but four times
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AA was a good balance between playability of very demanding games like
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Crisis 3 at very high settings on an R9 290X and image quality. Gaming on this
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screen this size is going to be immersive pretty much no matter how you slice it. And thanks to its very low
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lag, solid motion blur performance, and
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75 Hz panel that really does make a big
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difference over 60. By the way, the 34UMM67 is a pleasure to game on. But
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hold on a second, Lionus. You didn't even mention Freync yet. You're right. I
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didn't. But I will now hear in the conclusion. In spite of this monitor's
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presence in AMD's Freync media materials and the prominent logo on the box, I
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didn't find the implementation of Freync to be as useful as it can be in this
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case. But it took me a few hours and a lifeline call to my buddy Ryan Shrout
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from PC Perspective to figure out why I
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was encountering stuttering and tearing with Freync enabled when it was clearly
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working in AMD's windmill demo. It's because this monitor's adaptive refresh
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rate window is from 48 hertz to 75
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hertz, only 27 hertz. That means even if
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you enable freync with VSSync also on
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the experience is pretty good as long as your frame rates remain pretty high
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other than the very slight input lag penalty similar to VSync that is caused
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by capping your frame rate like that. And with it off, so with VSync off,
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you'll actually still get tearing anytime your game runs above 75 FPS. And
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there's more bad news, too. You'll get lag under 48 FPS thanks to LG's
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selection of 48 hertz as the low-end cut off of the adaptive refresh rate window
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on this monitor. But to be clear, this
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is not a knock-on freeync. There are monitors with much wider like 100 Hz
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plus Windows that go down to 40 Hz. And the spec actually allows for Windows as
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low as 9 hertz once panel technology improves. And it's actually not a
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condemnation of the 34UM67 as a gaming monitor either. Its size, IPS panel, and
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ultrawide aspect ratio along with its incredible responsiveness for
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considering all of those things still make it a totally unique gaming
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experience. It just means that those two technologies didn't complement each
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other as well as I was really hoping for in this case. So, this is cool. Well,
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we're giving away 30 one month XSplit professional codes. All you got to do is
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enter in the form thread in the video description and winners will be selected
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one week from today, April the 2nd.
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Pretty cool stuff. Not today, April the 2nd. On April the 2nd. Yay. Anyway, if
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you don't know what XSplit is, it's basically a broadcasting software that
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personally I absolutely love. We use it every Friday for our live show. It
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allows us to change scenes. It allows us to take a wide variety of different
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inputs and basically switch them around, move people around. We can import Skype
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callers so that we can have people, you know, joining us for our podcast or
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video podcast as it were. And it's awesome for game streamers, especially
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when it's paired with XSplit Game. So, there's broadcaster and game cer. So,
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Gamecaster is great for gamers because it allows you to bring up a little overlay so you can easily stop and start
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your stream and all that kind of good stuff. And one of the coolest things about XSplit is that it is absolutely
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free for the basic version. So all you got to do is head over to
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xplit.com/minus to start streaming and recording in HD today. So guys, thanks
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for watching. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked. Leave a comment uh hopefully at
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watching and as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all of that
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good stuff.