Gaming and Working at 4K-Going Big!
With CES 2022 starting today, and kicking into high gear tomorrow, I thought I would wax poetic about what is likely my best PC purchase since I left HardOCP way back when.
As you might know, I was huge proponent of multi-monitor gaming when AMD Eyefinity was first introduced. In fact, we even put on an event, over a decade ago now, called the “AMD [H]ardOCP Texas GamExperience.“ I vacillated between Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround over the years, depending on what card(s) I was using at the time, but once I expanded to triple displays for gaming and work, I was hooked. I think I used the same set of 21” monitors for around 6 or 7 years and I loved it.
One thing that I did that was a bit different was that I used my displays in portrait mode. I was doing an incredible amount of data collection and document editing in those years and having pixels top to bottom was more important to me than the wide view that Eyefinity allowed me in gaming. To be fully transparent, I was doing a lot more work than gaming in those days but would have much preferred to be gaming!
I finally made my mind up to make the jump from triple-displays to a 48” Samsung JS9000, which was pretty much the cock of the walk at that time when it came to PC usage, if you dialed it in right. It was great for work, but not so much for gaming. It was lacking a high refresh rate, and it had no form of FreeSync. Let’s all face it, high refresh rates, and variable refresh rates, were becoming all the rage, and rightly so. So, the JS9000 was somewhat short-lived as I started listening to Celso over his Coreteks Youtube channel.
Coreteks was going on about the, new at the time LG OLED TVs. I hit Celso up over Discord and had a couple of discussions with him about moving to a new LG OLED and I started feeling better about the purchase as those displays were not close to cheap. Also I had been following a HardForum thread, which is still alive and doing well today at over 8,000 posts that is full of great information, tips and tricks, and a lot of people posting in there had been getting very promising results. I finally pulled the trigger and bought the LG OLED48CXPUB (commission link) in December of 2020. That CX48 has gotten about $700 less expensive than when I bought it as well, but it is still a lot of dollars to chew on.
First and foremost, this CX48 gives you an incredible image. Image quality is something that will jump out at your the moment you turn it on. I was so impressed with the picture that I bought the CX65 to replace my TV in the living room less than two weeks later. Watching Star Wars Rebels on it made the show even better. Gaming on the CX48 is an excellent experience. I have been running this panel for most of its life with either an RTX 2080 Ti or the Radeon 6900XT since the first day that card came out. (I got lucky and got one at MSRP from AMD.com on the first try!) Having VRR at your disposal on such a big beautiful display is damn near the price of admission all on its own. This screen is 120Hz panel. I did have some issues getting the “right” cable, and this is where the HardForum thread helped out a lot.
There are a lot of folks that will balk at the 48” size as being too big, and they would be right in some cases. I have found with some games that require a focus on your peripheral vision, 48” is not the way to go, at least sitting so close to you on a desk. However what I have done for those few problematic games is run the game at 1440p in a borderless window so I can bring those sides in a bit. It works out great as it gives you a “32” screen” or there abouts. When it comes to productivity and getting actual work done, the CX48 has paid off in spades for me personally. I can have multiple windows open at the same time, easily refer to those when I need to immediately, and be able to copy and paste to and from those without slowing down once you get your window positioning worked out.
I have not experienced any burn-in over the last year…none. That was my primary concern. I have however taken the advice of running no background image, and I use a hidden taskbar, which I always did anyway. The panel did prompt me to run its “Pixel Refresher” last week, which is not something I had done in a long time. For the first couple of months I was very paranoid about burn-in, but finally lost my concerns, and went with the “who gives a damn” precautions besides the couple already mentioned. So far, so good.
Getting used to turning the panel on and off with the remote is sort of a pain in the ass to begin with. Finally I just resorted to the panel turning off after 10 minutes if I left it idle and all has worked out just fine.
This was just something that came to mind this morning and thought I would share it with you. I am fairly sure there are better large size panels out a year later, or some with better features. Gaming at 48”, at 4K, with VRR, and stellar picture quality is the bomb! To quote Farris Bueller, “It is So choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”
Stay [H]ard!
Update 1/4/2022: An astute HardForum poster pointed out a couple of things I should mention here. To get all those new fangled VRR and color gamut goodies, you do need an HDMI 2.1 fully compliant video card. You can hit the link above to get his take on that. Also, he pointed out that this display now comes in a 42” (LG C2 OLED) model, which actually was not announced quite yet when I bit the “publish” button yesterday. You cannot purchase it, but it was announced at CES yesterday afternoon.