Gaming on the GOD of Monitors! - ASUS PG27UQ 4K 144Hz First Look
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,969 words · ~9 min read
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do you guys have any idea how long i've been waiting for this
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actually that can be calculated because i first showed this off what was it ces
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a year and a half ago this it's finally here is ASUS
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144 hertz 4k
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HDR with a thousand nit peak brightness
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g-sync gaming monitor this is it this is
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quite literally monitor god mode it has
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everything and we get to be the first
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to take a finished model for a test drive
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and finished comes with a big asterisk because this isn't quite final hardware
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and we don't have quite the final drivers
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but i couldn't wait speaking of not being able to wait you
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won't be able to wait to try out glass wire glasswire is a firewall that
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displays your pc's incoming and outgoing network connections in real time and you
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can use offer code Linus to get 25 off glasswire 2.0 check it out at the link
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below
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okay so step number one is to get this
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bad boy and i did assume it's gender i'm sorry
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get this bad mofo neutral
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get this thing set up i have waited so long for this and
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it's not a seuss's fault or so they say
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although i think NVIDIA has actually been pretty upfront that it's uh that it's
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been their fault so what has delayed it
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is not anything about the panel like they showed this thing working they had
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they had games running on it in the past what's delayed it has been getting HDR
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working with g-sync because individually
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those technologies are complicated enough and having them work at the same
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time because this isn't like your typical hd rn like those monitors out
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there that claim to have HDR support where they'll accept an hdr10 input but
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they have maybe 350 or maybe 450 nitpeak
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brightness this uses 384
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zones of full array backlighting in
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order to achieve 1 000 knit peak brightness and deep blacks at least in
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theory so we've only seen it at this stage of production on the bfg big fn
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displays that NVIDIA showed at ces this year and you can actually see like
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physically this thing is loaded for bear i mean you don't have
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a full array backlight without compromising on things like thickness so
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ASUS literature claims it can draw up to 180 watts from the wall
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it's thick it's got big old thick bezels which they
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justify by saying realistically you weren't going to be
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running more than one of these off of a single system
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at 4k 144 FPS
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anyway and i mean i guess that's all there is to
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really say about it physically isn't there let's get it turned on oh oh no there is
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more while james is getting the system set up let's take you guys for a quick
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tour of the stand so it goes up and down
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about like yay it goes side to side about like yay it tilts up and down
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about like yay and it pivots about like yay so if you if you like your 4k 144
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hertz this way because you're some kind of a monster you're playing peggle or
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something alternately you can use this for exactly
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what i use it for which is easier access to the i o so it's got a single HDMI 2.0
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though it should be noted that even HDMI 2.0 is nowhere near able to run 144hz 4k
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you're going to be limited to 60 hertz and then displayport 1.4 and that is
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where the magic happens with a compatible graphics card you can drive
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that massive resolution over a single cable oh and it also has a usb hub and a
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pass-through audio jack oh okay okay so no we're not ready to
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turn it on quite yet because i guess we have to talk about the lighting effects
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so it's got it's got a customizable underglow you
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can put your own lens in there and have it say or show whatever you want you
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just write on the included uh blanks with a sharpie it's got a projected rog
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logo that it fires at the wall behind it
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see that coming out of the back here it's got a matching rog
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it's got a matching rog logo on the stand right here and then it's got full
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rsync compatibility on the RGB logo on
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the back because that's the side of this monitor that i'm
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going to look at i mean i don't actually know the final pricing but if i'm going
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to pay however much this thing's going to cost i want to enjoy it from every
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side every side let's start by making sure that we're
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running at 4k 144 hertz
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ah okay because getting that going is a little bit tricky you do need to make
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sure you're using a high quality displayport cable and that's actually an
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overclocked refresh rate
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so what happens is you enable max
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refresh rate 144 hertz in the control
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panel of the monitor and then it enables 144hz 4k now you are
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giving up something here because as soon as you go past i think it's 96
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hertz at 4k you're going to be giving up some of the chroma sub sampling so
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you're going to be giving up some of your color reproduction and if you
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actually look really closely here we're getting a little bit of fringing on the text but the theory is that you're not
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going to really notice this in games so
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let's go ahead and hit up cs go now this is a game that
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should actually be able to run at 4k
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144 frames per second even at pretty high details on this hardware but
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that's not going to be true of most things even though we're running a gtx
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1080 ti and we got an email from ASUS
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literally nine minutes ago saying that titan v
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should also work a lot of games are just straight up not
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going to be able to take advantage of the 144 hertz refresh rate which is i
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guess where g-sync comes in because even if you're hovering between 45 and 85
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it's gonna look smooth so csgo doesn't support HDR so what we've done is turned
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it off in the Windows control panel man this thing is butter smooth
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you can't even see an individual pixel now i've seen this display running in
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demos but i've never actually been able to drive like check this out like
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brandon even look at stuff that's like far away like this
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and we're running at 144 frames per second like from a
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reasonable distance and like even without any backlight
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strobing as i move back and forth you can still read text
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so fortnite's not the most demanding game out there but
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at 4k everything but a set to epic
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i still i'm expecting this to be a little bit challenging
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here we go so even with a gtx 1080 ti
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we're looking at about 75 65 frames per
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second is this guy following me
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dude i don't know what i'm doing so initial impressions here although we
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aren't running in HDR are that
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dang it are that the chroma subsampling
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doesn't seem to be hurting us yet but we are going to reserve judgment for
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when is this really a real player
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wow you suck it actually helps to offset it that
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you've got these nice little backgrounds or drop shadows on all the text because
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that's where you'd be most likely to see it but we're gonna reserve full judgment
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for when we do the full review on the finished hardware with the finished
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drivers this does look really good though
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i gotta say i am impressed with everything depth of blacks vibrance of
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colors without overdoing it it looks really good okay so for HDR
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we're going to enable it within the Windows control panel you do need a
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handful of things obviously a supported graphics card with the right firmware
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apparently NVIDIA is planning to release a firmware updater tool just in case you
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have an older 1080 ti that needs to be flashed
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you need the latest spring creators update and of course you need a title
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like destiny 2 that has support for HDR
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so we're tuning up our graphics settings for destiny 2. um honestly we're not
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even going to try and crank this because even with sli which has been sort of a
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uh an abandoned step child for both NVIDIA and game
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developers over the last little while we're not gonna expect to be able to run
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a game like this at max settings 144
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hertz are these bad guys cool
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i can definitely feel the reduction in frame rate
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but it's very usable i gotta say my biggest criticism of the
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big effing gaming displays was that while the blacks are really
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deep like you can see here in the shadows on the truck um or like under the shadows of the
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trees and the whites were really bright it was really noticeable when a light
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moved from one zone into another one in the full array backlight
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on the smaller display not so much
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it is a lot harder to pick up on while there's a little bit okay just go go
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away while there's a little bit of halo
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it's not bad like you see that
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so i gotta tell you guys first impressions
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very impress is it worth the money well given that we
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don't know the price yet and given that we don't have the final hardware yet
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we're going to have to reserve judgment for the full review which will be coming
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but it is looking very very promising
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