Hey everyone,

Lately I've been searching to replace my 2-year-old 1080p 28-inch Asus monitor. It's been flickering at the top of the screen and is somewhat unpleasant, especially during games. So I figured it's a good excuse to replace it. 

I've been looking at 4K monitors. Most of them are either too expensive, or simply not the quality that I'm looking for. I know for a fact that I want to stick with the Asus brand. 

I was looking at this 4K monitor, but it's way to expensive for me. http://www.amazon.com/PA328Q-3840x2160-DisplayPort-Ergonomic-Back-lit/dp/B00YWD9ZZM/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8

Now there is a cheaper 2K version of that exact monitor. Which is more than half the price, something I'm more than willing to pay. http://www.amazon.com/PB328Q-2560x1440-DisplayPort-Ergonomic-Back-lit/dp/B00XI4PAD2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1446390697&sr=8-1&keywords=Asus+PB32Q

I think I want to go with this monitor because it's huge, 32 inches to be exact, and it will fell like an upgrade as opposed to getting another 28-inch monitor, 4K or not. It's also incredibly slim and beautiful, and 1440 is a decent upgrade over 1080.  The only problem is, I don't know if it's good for gaming. Some reviews on it stated that it's side lit, not back lit, resulting in ghosting and trails. Making it not good for any First Person Shooters. A response to this comment told the person to turn off VividPixel, which fixes this issue and makes the monitor shine. I don't know how true this is. Here is the negative review in question. All other reviews were mostly positive, but none of them mentioned gaming: http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3MOD9VHHH14LJ/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00XI4PAD2

The monitor's response time is 4 ms. I don't know if that acceptable for gaming either. Here's the specs of the monitor: 
http://www.meetgadget.com/gadget/73534/ASUS+PB328Q

There it states that it is in fact back-lit, so I have no idea. If anyone has any knowledge about monitors in general and could tell me if this monitor is okay, please let me know. I really don't want to spend $500 on a monitor that won't be good for moderate-heavy gaming and general web surfing. The problem with this monitor is that I can't find any reviews about it online, other than Amazon. 

Additionally: Is there a noticeable difference between 1080 and 1440? Just curious. I know it wont be as big as difference like 4K, but will it still be something? 

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Nick 

Edited November 1, 201510 yr by Original Light

Hm, I'm not a real expert at monitors and the one I have right now is not 4k, and "only" 27". @unr3al has been known to be quite well versed in the art of hardware. Any input, if you have time? :D

5 hours ago, ineseri said:

Hm, I'm not a real expert at monitors and the one I have right now is not 4k, and "only" 27". @unr3al has been known to be quite well versed in the art of hardware. Any input, if you have time? :D

I had no idea you could tag people on this forum. Neat.

Regarding the monitor; firstly, before you make the leap to resolutions above 1080p, make sure that you have a monster of a video card ready to handle it. Secondly, the lighting of a monitor is an area of controversy. A lot of LCD monitors (at least while I was still selling and repairing computer hardware) have a single back light in the dead center of the screen. This would occasionally cause issue where the color vividness and brightness would wither as you got closer to the sides of the screen. Later LCD models corrected this by having either more than one back light, or by having side lighting; which technically can cause the problem you described; although I've never actually seen that problem happen in the real world. LED monitors as far as I know shouldn't have any sort of side lighting or back lighting at all; because LED literally stands for light emitting diode. They're literally a bunch of illuminated dots evenly spread across the screen that can change colors. Think of it as a light bright toy (if you were an American in the 90's, you'll remember):

LED Back light Setup

 

Light Bright Toy



They share the same principal. Interchangeable colors over a constantly on back light. So there should be no need for "side lighting" now that we're in the days of LED's. No idea what they're talking about now that liquid crystal is no longer the major type of monitor.

Response time is kind of a mixed bag. Some monitors will advertise themselves as being 2ms delay; but it doesn't always specify if it's 2ms gray to gray, or another color spectrum. I had a 2ms Samsung LCD monitor that was nice; and unfortunately it died on me after a few years. It would no longer turn on; and I needed a replacement monitor immediately; so I reluctantly went to a local electronics store and bought what I could. I wound up getting an LG IPS (in-plain switching) LED monitor with a 5ms delay. I've noticed no real world difference despite the fact that I played shooters that demanded quick reaction time such as Counter Strike Source/GO and Battlefield 3 & 4.

Lastly, resolution is a literal multiplication measurement of how many pixels are on screen; like when your math teacher asked you to get the 'area' of a square or a rectangle. You multiply length times width to get your answer. Fun fact: Monitors are now wide screen instead of squares due to the human peripheral vision being wider from left to right than it is from above to below.

A resolution of 1920X1080 gives you a total of 2,073,600 pixels to play with. That's certainly a lot, but the problem is that as the surface area of the monitor gets bigger, and the resolution stays the same; those pixels need to become a lot bigger to cover the surface area. So if you want a massive monitor, 1080p isn't going to look all that good compared to a monitor of equal size sitting next to it with a higher resolution.

Just keep in mind that when dealing with monitors; yes, a higher resolution can make things look crisper, but its at the sacrifice of your GPU having to work a lot harder to render everything. You need more texture memory to store the larger textures being applied to models, and the memory clock speeds and core clock speeds need to be higher to move that information through. I could technically fit a 27" monitor where I'm sitting (I have a 23"), and if I paid a good chunk of money, I could get a 4K monitor instead of the 1080p resolution that I have. But on a screen this small, I probably wouldn't notice the difference, and my frame rate has nowhere to go but down when applying that higher resolution. On a big screen TV, that's another story. A 50" LED running 4K resolution does indeed look nicer (but only when running 4K content; which is currently almost non-existent with current TV channels).

TLDR; Buy what makes sense. Frame rate, cost, space. Those are the main factors to consider.

Edited November 2, 201510 yr by unr3al

Thanks for the response. I do remember that light toy. Even though I was born in 1997 I believe those were still common in the early 00's! In regards to frame rate, I have a Titan X. It won't run 4k games at 60 fps but it can do around 30-40 which is good enough for me. So I can definitely drive the monitor. It looks like I'll be getting it since you said you don't feel a difference with 5ms. Thanks again.