You'll never notice the fan noise gaming with or without headphones.
World first QD-OLED monitor from Dell and Samsung (34 inch Ultrawide 175hz)
- Thread starter Grim5
- Start date
You'll never notice the fan noise gaming with or without headphones.
Soldato
Currently £999
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Anyone use this for productivity/programming? Whats it like.....
Man of Honour
For productivity yes, that's my main use case. And for that it's no different on the face of it to any other 34" ultra-wide with the same res and refresh rate range. The benefit here is that the image quality is much more "pure" because it's OLED. The curve is more subtle than others in this size though which helps keep things not feeling like they are distorting to the eye (illusion) - Many screens have a much deeper curve which feels weird during non gaming work.
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Forgive ol sieve brain here. this monitor doesn't suffer from that thing my OLEd tv does where the brightness noticeably changes when doing stuff, like when something is white it goes darker? I forget the name, might be ABL or something. Was distracting on games too.
Still too rich for my blood. Just had to shell out for a new fridge freezer.
Man of Honour
Don't forget Quidco cashback and any credit card offers you might have. Many of us got it for around the £800-£850 mark after cashbacks etc and there will be Dell 10% off codes floating about too or greater.
That's ABL ramping yes. All HDR screens will have some form of this, with some it's severe, others subtle. In SDR mode there is no such ABL ramp noticed at all, brightness stays consistent which you would expect since it's in SDR mode, which is what you will be in 99% of the time anyway. In HDR mode if you increase the area size of the HDR content that's bright/white, then the surrounding area of the display will dim slightly depending on how large an area of the screen the HDR content is taking up whilst the media itself remains bright.
Here's a quick pair of gifs to show you what I mean (ignore the phone camera metering!), my screen is set to HDR 1000 mode for reference:
In practice, when watching a HDR video full screen or playing a game, I do not notice the ABL as it's in full screen mode anyway and in such content it's very rare that a large portion of the screen is consumed by a bright white image anyway.
SDR mode:
HDR video playing:
Anyone wishing to test with high brightness HDR content then I just played some of the videos from here in MPC-BE using the MPV Video Decoder set to send the HDR signal to the monitor and trigger HDR mode when HDR content is detected: https://4kmedia.org/
That's ABL ramping yes. All HDR screens will have some form of this, with some it's severe, others subtle. In SDR mode there is no such ABL ramp noticed at all, brightness stays consistent which you would expect since it's in SDR mode, which is what you will be in 99% of the time anyway. In HDR mode if you increase the area size of the HDR content that's bright/white, then the surrounding area of the display will dim slightly depending on how large an area of the screen the HDR content is taking up whilst the media itself remains bright.
Here's a quick pair of gifs to show you what I mean (ignore the phone camera metering!), my screen is set to HDR 1000 mode for reference:
In practice, when watching a HDR video full screen or playing a game, I do not notice the ABL as it's in full screen mode anyway and in such content it's very rare that a large portion of the screen is consumed by a bright white image anyway.
SDR mode:
HDR video playing:
Anyone wishing to test with high brightness HDR content then I just played some of the videos from here in MPC-BE using the MPV Video Decoder set to send the HDR signal to the monitor and trigger HDR mode when HDR content is detected: https://4kmedia.org/
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@mrk Really appreciate the detailed response thank you. I thought it was just OLED specific, didn't realise it was HDR dependent. I'm not a massive fan of HDR in general, find it varies so much game to game that I am often wondering if the benefit is worth the constant wondering if I have the settings 'right', though games like CP2077 look vastly different with it on/off.
Am I right in thinking I'll have to use HDMI on my GPU to hit the refresh rate on that monitor? I think I read 4090 DP is limited to like 144 or something unless you enable some weird setting that allegedly effects image quality.
Am I right in thinking I'll have to use HDMI on my GPU to hit the refresh rate on that monitor? I think I read 4090 DP is limited to like 144 or something unless you enable some weird setting that allegedly effects image quality.
Man of Honour
DisplayPort is the connection to use if connecting to a PC as it supports the max 175Hz refresh rate.
The 4090 thing only affects 4k resolution as you are limited to 120Hz refresh rate at 4K because the GPU only has DP 1.4 ports. The AW only has HDMI 2.0 ports too so the refresh rate is more limited there, I think I recall 100Hz on the HDMI ports.
In 8-bit mode in Windows you can set 175Hz refresh rate no problems and this is the default setting. In 10-bit mode the max refresh rate is 144Hz. This is the mode I am in because I want everything to be colour accurate as best as possible, and the difference felt between 144 and 175 is negligible anyway.
8-bit mode uses dithering, and nvidia's dither is very good quality. You are unlikely to ever tell the difference between 8 and 10 generally. Both look great.
The 4090 thing only affects 4k resolution as you are limited to 120Hz refresh rate at 4K because the GPU only has DP 1.4 ports. The AW only has HDMI 2.0 ports too so the refresh rate is more limited there, I think I recall 100Hz on the HDMI ports.
In 8-bit mode in Windows you can set 175Hz refresh rate no problems and this is the default setting. In 10-bit mode the max refresh rate is 144Hz. This is the mode I am in because I want everything to be colour accurate as best as possible, and the difference felt between 144 and 175 is negligible anyway.
8-bit mode uses dithering, and nvidia's dither is very good quality. You are unlikely to ever tell the difference between 8 and 10 generally. Both look great.
Permabanned
Annoying, £999 with £299 discount, if I apply student discount code of 5% it removes the £299 discount and increases the price to £1,234.04 
(infact seems to do that with any discount code)
(infact seems to do that with any discount code)
Man of Honour
That's a shame, I recall now that Dell updated the store page so you could not stack discounts like you could during the initial release! Some people got it for around the £650 mark lol after all the discounts.
If you are using vrr, I'd recommend 175 8 bit over 144 10 bit. This is because the slight raise in near black gamma at 144 vrr, although very slight is more noticeable to the eye than 8 bit dithering.
Man of Honour
Have to say I still have not noticed the black lift at 144 yet in practice. Is there a game where you have noticed it outright that I might also have installed to check with?
I’m on my 2nd Alienware monitor now and does anyone have the same problem in that over time there is little grayish patches that appear on the monitor that looks like the very top film part of the monitor has been scratched off? These only appear in daylight when there is a dark image and can’t really be seen when there are colours on the screen but they do look like dirty marks and are annoying as they cannot be fixed it seems? My first monitor was riddled with them and my replacement has a few of the same marks. Curious if anyone else has this problem?
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Yes my monitor has that problem as well as a stuck pixel.
It's tiny at 144 but it is there. If you are in a dark room and look at a black level test, if you change from 175-144-120-100-60 you will notice the first squares getting more and more visible. 60 being the most obvious as the further from 175 the more it lifts.
Man of Honour
Ah yes it really is tiny, I did a test between all the refresh rates:
In person I can discern all of the squares along the top row at all refresh rates, but as you can see, at 60Hz the first 3 squares are lifted and captured on camera. I used my phone in manual mode so excuse any noise etc.
Between 120Hz and 175Hz though it's almost a tie to my eyes and hopefully the pics above show that.
The issue I have with 175Hz though is that there is very obvious flickering when you have apps with large amounts of dark grey being used, like Photoshop for example when you are moving around the canvas, zooming in and out etc:
I mentioned this flickering in my first few posts after getting this monitor, granted not everyone will experience this because not everyone uses Photoshop with the same layout etc I have noticed this flicker in games as well, as I play a lot of survival horror games, this was immediately obvious to me when I was gaming on this the first time.
To my eyes 144Hz 10-bit (or even 8 if you prefer but not sure why anyone would choose 8 when 10 is an option lol) looks to be the perfect balance.
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Yup, it is small but more noticeable when it is changing in real time.Ah yes it really is tiny, I did a test between all the refresh rates:
In person I can discern all of the squares along the top row at all refresh rates, but as you can see, at 60Hz the first 3 squares are lifted and captured on camera. I used my phone in manual mode so excuse any noise etc.
Between 120Hz and 175Hz though it's almost a tie to my eyes and hopefully the pics above show that.
The issue I have with 175Hz though is that there is very obvious flickering when you have apps with large amounts of dark grey being used, like Photoshop for example when you are moving around the canvas, zooming in and out etc:
I mentioned this flickering in my first few posts after getting this monitor, granted not everyone will experience this because not everyone uses Photoshop with the same layout etc I have noticed this flicker in games as well, as I play a lot of survival horror games, this was immediately obvious to me when I was gaming on this the first time.
To my eyes 144Hz 10-bit (or even 8 if you prefer but not sure why anyone would choose 8 when 10 is an option lol) looks to be the perfect balance.
There are some games that you can change the fps slider on the fly and it becomes much more apparent and easier to see.
The flickering at 144 is less pronounced because the floor is already slightly lifted, sorta masks some of the effect.
But to me I am sensitive to the black raise a lot more than the dithering so just point out the recommendation as some maybe like me.
This 60hz one is a real problem for me as any game like cyberpunk with fps at that range is very noticeable. LG have a setting to make 60hz the curve etc so I can mitigate there.
From your pics I can definitely see square 3 raised at 120 vs 144
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