- GIGABYTE AORUS sponsored this video.
And while I've been a huge fan
of gaming on ultrawide monitors
ever since their debut around seven years ago,
today, they have a bit of a problem and that's price.
Compared to the F048U or other large format OLEDs,
ultrawides tend to be priced as though they still have
the parts of the display that have kind of been
sliced off to narrow the field of view.
Now, this does contribute to a more cinematic experience,
but it was actually Wendell from "Level1Techs"
that initially made the argument to me.
He goes, "Linus, why are you paying extra
for a sliced off monitor,
when you could just have a bigger one
and put the black bars on it for that cinematic view?"
Now, if we were talking about
conventional monitor technology, I would say,
"Look, I don't want two glowing black bars shining at me
while I'm trying to experience my game or my movie,
but with OLED, you can turn those pixels off.
So,
why settle?
Why not have cinematic ultrawide when you want it
and full, gigantic 16:9
when you want to get some work done?
Let's take a look at the F048U
and find out if I am going to be abandoning
ultrawide once and for all. (thuds)
(theme music)
(chuckles)
I actually can't figure out how this box opens.
It has the normal conventional monitor opening things here,
but then, it has more TV style ones here.
Let's try doing it the monitor way.
Now, GIGABYTE AORUS did sponsor this video,
which entitles them
to a couple of key product talking points.
But before we even get to those,
we gotta acknowledge the elephant in the room.
There is only one manufacturer
of 48" OLED panels right now, LG Display.
So, that means any price premium,
GIGABYTE AORUS demands for the F048U,
will have to be justified
whether it's by the accessory package
or by the gaming and monitor centric features
that they've built into the display.
That uphill battle begins with an accessory package
that is more interesting than it at first appears to be,
starting with the remote.
Unlike an LG smart TV, you're not gonna have
a built-in Netflix app or anything like that.
But what you will have hopefully,
is more gaming centric features
in a more conventional monitor OSD.
The next thing we find here, a DisplayPort cable.
That's right.
No TV on the market that I'm aware of,
supports DisplayPort 1.4.
Now, whether we're actually able to leverage that
to run at 144 Hz 4k with overclocking,
it remains to be seen.
But a girl can dream, right?
An HD ultra high speed cable for the included HDMI 2.1 port.
You could use that for your game console for example.
There's a USB 3.0 cable, so it'll have a built-in hub
like you would expect from a monitor,
power cord and this product warranty card.
Now, while the C10
and the C1 can be used as desktop displays,
there are a few sort of
quirks.
That begins with the stand, which on the C1 48"
is a long wide foot that makes it
difficult to run cables under your monitor.
With that said, I'm not a huge fan of these
sort of widespread little feet either.
Well, thankfully, both of them have VESA mount
on the back, so you can ultimately put them
on whatever stand you'd like.
The bigger issue though,
is that on the TV version of this panel,
not all of the input modes are optimized for gaming.
And more importantly,
the brightness will automatically modulate.
That is to say it will dim when it detects a static image.
This is to help reduce the chance of the pixels wearing out
or becoming burned in.
Now, you can alleviate this and most of the issues
with using an LG OLED as a desktop display,
but in doing so, you could end up
actually voiding your warranty
by changing unauthorized settings in the service menu.
That is why I held up the warranty card.
And that is where this monitor might end up standing out
for people who really want to use an OLED
as a large format desktop display.
Of course, some of the other benefits
aren't very well laid out on the product page
and I don't even know if there are benefits.
For example, there's a USB Type-C port here.
What does it do? I have no idea.
There's a 3.5 mm input, as well the headphone jack
that presumably will carry the audio stream
from your HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 1.4 input.
And, ah, this is a key benefit.
Navigation can be done with the nipple
on the bottom of the display,
rather than using the remote if you want to, which is nice.
I actually am using
a C10
48" at work right now
and having to have the remote on my desk,
does add unnecessary clutter.
Oh, shoot. I gotta move my old monitor. (scoffs)
By the way, if you're confused as to why I ended up
with the LG UltraGear on my desk
after the ASUS version kind of won
the shootout that I was doing,
it came down to the lower pixel response times
on this particular model,
which is what makes this AORUS display
such a contender for my desk
because OLED inherently has much,
much lower pixel response times than,
we'll really any LCD-based technology.
One small challenge is going to be my streaming stuff
and the cable management holes
that I drilled in my desk though.
That purple cast, when it's off,
you can really tell it's an LG OLED, hey.
So the bad news is you're paying
a lot more than for the LG version,
but the good news is,
you know that it's an absolutely kick-ass pound.
You're just paying extra for warranty,
the DisplayPort port.
Oh! Actually, and the integrated soundbar.
I haven't tried this yet, but obviously, being a TV,
the C10 and the C1 do not have great integrated sound
because they have no visible speaker grills.
Hopefully, this is a little better.
I already have a USB...
(gasps)
Oh my, shoot, my pre-run cables don't reach.
Now, it seems like as good a time as any to get in some of
GIGABYTE AORUS' talking points here.
Let me change my desktop wallpaper.
This is a little awkward. (laughing)
Oh, this is hilarious.
I already mentioned everything organically,
except it support for 10-bit color, obviously.
And it's 98% coverage of the DCIP3 color space.
Now, something that's not well understood
about this monitor is it's HDR capabilities.
It does say on the product page,
it supports both HDR-10 and HLG.
Now, I've already noticed,
when bringing up large full screen white content,
I am seeing some dimming of the display.
You guys noticed that?
Can you see how bright that is?
And then if I go full screen,
you can see it's a little dimmer.
But what I also noticed is it seems to be a bit faster
in terms of that responsiveness.
Whether you prefer that or not is entirely up to you,
but let's see what we can do to tune it in the menu.
So we're in SDR, vivid.
Really? My options are custom 1 custom 2 and green?
Oh, green like... (laughing)
Green like power saving.
I thought you meant green, like a green tint.
(Andy laughing) That's very...
GIGABYTE, I'd like you to change that.
Call it eco or something please.
Oh, oh, there's a whole bunch more,
reader, movie, RTS, RPG, FPS, arcade, standard.
That's weird. Okay.
Burn this image into your mind, pun intended.
Is green brighter than vivid?
- [Andy] No way.
- It is.
- [Andy] No way, that doesn't really make any sense.
- But it is! (Andy laughing)
- Type-C, DSC.
I think that's Display Stream Compression.
I think it has a Type-C
display (chuckles) input, Andy.
- [Andy] Wow. That's nice.
- I'm gonna go get my laptop and find out.
Man, imagine it has USB Power Delivery
and charges of the laptop,
(keyboard clacks) and just has that
completely not dock...
It totally does. It has Power Delivery.
It charges the laptop. (keyboard clacks)
Since we're poking around in the AMD control panel,
the reported FreeSync refresh rate is 48 to 120 Hz,
So as long as you don't get below 48 fps in your game,
you shouldn't experience any stutter or tearing.
After fiddling with it,
I wish I had a more complete answer for you, guys,
but I do at least have some information.
It supports Power Delivery,
but with a very limited amount of power,
so you'll probably have to plug in your laptop separately
and over the Type-C port, it does accept a display input.
But so far,
I've only managed to go as far as 4k 60 Hz or 1440p 120 Hz.
It's hard to say whether that's limitation on my laptop
or the display at this point.
And I don't have any alternatives here with me.
Oh, cool! It has a built-in KVM switch.
So that's a function of the built-in USB hub, I guess.
Of course the Type-C and the Type-B
can be your alternate computers.
(finger snaps)
Frickin' sick.
And then, you plug your mouse
and keyboard into the USB A ports.
I don't actually need that function personally,
but if you frequently use two computers, say for example,
you're a developer, that would be super handy.
Audio mode out, 600R. I have no idea what I just did.
What is 600R?
Okay, we're back on the Type-C input.
Okay, we're back.
600R is a setting that allows you to tune
the audio output for high impedance headphones.
It also caused my display board input
to immediately cease functioning. (chuckles)
Actually, wait, Andy, this is interesting.
I'm only getting 4k 60 Hz here as well.
I wonder if there's another
DisplayPort setting I didn't see before.
The good news is that 4k 120 Hz works just fine.
The bad news is that this Thunderbolt 3 Dock
that I use actually only supports DisplayPort 1.2.
So that means, 4K 60 Hz, unless I want to
drag the DisplayPort cable through the wall right now.
Okay, I'm plugging in the new cable.
What is this doing back here?
Look at this cute Linus plushy, lttstore.com.
It's not exactly ideal,
but this is the longest DisplayPort cable I have.
I'm gonna have to fix the cable management later,
but I should be able to send it to 4k 120 Hz now.
(cheering)
I do notice a little bit of a green tinge when I'm off-axis,
so when I'm looking into the corners,
just because the display is so large,
so I would recommend having a solid 18 to maybe even 24"
between you and the display,
if you do plan to use it as a desktop display.
It's hard to really gauge performance
without all of our gear
and a 48" TV to put right beside it.
But what I will say about the HDR
content consumption experience is that
compared to GIGABYTE AORUS' specs,
this is a lot better than I expected.
Of course not everything's HDR.
Let's change gears and focus on gaming.
I'll start with one of my all-time favorite games,
which happens to benefit from as much screen real estate
as you can possibly throw at it,
"Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance".
So one of the coolest things about this game
is these strategic zoom.
You don't have a mini map.
You just use your mouse wheel to see the whole map.
And I'm being bombed. I did not build lay fighters.
Well, I did say I wanted this to be a quick one, didn't I?
- [Andy] Mm-hmm.
- Yep, that was it. That's the GG.
Either way,
is this a great gaming experience?
Uh, freakin' yeah, a little bit.
Now let's change gears and talk about how we can set this up
for the more cinematic black bar experience.
Instead of having the scaling performed on our display,
we're gonna have it performed on our GPU
and we're gonna change our scaling mode to aspect ratio.
You can also change it to no scaling.
And then you'll just have
kind of however many pixels you specify
sized display in the middle.
Like for example, the 3840 x 1800 resolution that I made,
that's gonna give me some kinda cinematic black bars,
but it's going to allow me to continue
to utilize the full horizontal resolution of my display.
So let's go ahead and fire up "DOOM Eternal".
And there you have it, cinematic,
ultrawide gaming experience on a regular 16 x 9 monitor,
TV, whatever, whatever this thing is.
The one thing you can't do is make it curved obviously.
And that's something that can be an advantage
on a display of this size,
which leaves us one more major thing to uncover.
Can it support 144 Hz with overclocking?
That would be an advantage over a TV.
So far, it's not looking good.
Sometimes, monitors will have a setting
that allows them to enable overclocking.
I don't see anything like that in here though,
so all that's left is to try this one more time
and see if it clicks.
Okay, we're going to the settings menu.
It thinks it's at 4k 144 Hz, it's actually at 120 Hz,
so the scaler might think it can take 144 Hz input,
but the actual panel does not seem to be running at 144.
I thought maybe ARS figured out
some kinda super cool way to get it to run at 144.
The reality of it is it's not a huge difference
between 120 and 144 in terms of the perception,
but I mean, hey, every little bit counts.
Last thing's left.
- [Narrator] You can't take a step forward
without a leap of faith.
- Yeah, the built-in speakers are...
They're okay.
They're bigger and they fire directly at you,
which is an advantage,
but they're still monitor speakers
and you're still gonna need a nice pair of cans.
And that's it.
Whether or not you need a monitor like this,
well, that's up to you,
but I can tell you that the experience
of using a large format display like this
as a gaming monitor, un-freaking-believable.
And I will not be swapping this out for my ultrawide.
This is coming with me to the new house
and my new gaming setup,
but I'll probably get like a VESA mount for it.
So it comes off the back of the desk
and have a nice clean set up.