Curious about monitors.

[FrostyButt]

I own and use two monitors that I purchased from Best Buy. I don't know the exact model, but they're made by Acer and are 1920x1080 60Hz. I've been curious about monitors because I constantly hear people talk about 60Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz, ect ect. I honestly have no fucking clue what any of that means, but I'm assuming the higher the Hz then the better for gaming.

So I have checked Amazon for gaming monitors and came across some that are well in the thousands of dollars. Yeah, no thanks. I might as well buy a new PC with that kind of money. I continued to look around and came across one on Amazon that had really good ratings and was more in my price range.

The LG 34UC79G-B.

How much of an improvement and I going to see getting a monitor like that? I know when I went from my shitty old box computer screen to a flat screen monitor, my jaw just dropped.. Am I going to get the same experience?

[mrgreenthump]

Hz is short for Hertz, which means cycle per second. Basically meaning if it's on a monitor, said monitor can show a frame as many times in a second(fps). To have higher refresh rate is better, but not as much as marketing wants you to believe. The difference going from 60 fps to say 120 fps is somewhat noticable, but only when there is really fast movement on the screen, meaning mostly first person shooters, that you twitch move a lot in.

But to make things a lot more difficult, there's also the panel type and it's properties like response time. TN is fast but has poorer viewing angles. IPS has superior colors(noticable difference), but is usually a bit slower on response, VA is somewhat a compromise between the two. Fast response time is important for gaming, though unless you are really competitive, having a monitor, that has a true response of ~5-10ms is plenty.

The LG screen is good, but it is really hard to recommend it, or in fact anything else, before knowing your setup, as you may not be able to leverage high Hz monitors to their max potential, in which case you may also need freesync/Gsync. The LG screen has Freesync, but if you have Nvidia GPU, you can't use it.

As far as gaming on ultrawide, it's pretty nice, plus productivity goes up a lot as well, though I haven't seen a 34" 2560 x 1080 monitor myself, I assume apart from a bit poorer pixel density it delivers all the same benefits.. Though you'll have black bars to the side on 16:9 content.

[Shakadam]

LG 34UC79G-B seems pretty good just from looking at specs, I haven't read any reviews about it so I don't know how good it is in reality. I'm not entirely sold on the 2560x1080 resolution though. To me, 2560x1440 or 3440x1440 are more pleasant to work or game on.

[FrostyButt]

LG 34UC79G-B seems pretty good just from looking at specs, I haven't read any reviews about it so I don't know how good it is in reality. I'm not entirely sold on the 2560x1080 resolution though. To me, 2560x1440 or 3440x1440 are more pleasant to work or game on.

That seems to be the general consensus that I'm getting from the reviews. While many reviews say it would be better if it was 1440, 2560x1080 isn't that bad. I was checking around Amazon some more and found the same monitor, but with Gsync. It's 1,000 dollars. I'm assuming it's because of the Gsync feature. Why in the world is Gsync so expensive? Doesn't Freesync/Gsync pretty much do the same thing?

[Shakadam]

That seems to be the general consensus that I'm getting from the reviews. While many reviews say it would be better if it was 1440, 2560x1080 isn't that bad. I was checking around Amazon some more and found the same monitor, but with Gsync. It's 1,000 dollars. I'm assuming it's because of the Gsync feature. Why in the world is Gsync so expensive? Doesn't Freesync/Gsync pretty much do the same thing?

Gsync is proprietary Nvidia tech and requires a module installed in the monitor to work. Freesync is free to use and uses Adaptive-Sync technology which is integrated into the displayport 1.2a (and above) standard and HDMI 2.1.
Basically, it doesn't cost anything extra for a manufacturer to enable Freesync capability in a monitor where as Gsync has a significant price premium.

[draynay]

It would help to know what kind of hardware you have. The more pixels and the higher the refresh rate, the more demanding. If you have to turn all your settings down and can't push beyond 60hz anyway, its just wasted money.

[FrostyButt]

It would help to know what kind of hardware you have. The more pixels and the higher the refresh rate, the more demanding. If you have to turn all your settings down and can't push beyond 60hz anyway, its just wasted money.

Currently have an i5-4690 with a 960. 16GB RAM.. Nothing special. I plan to upgrade/buy new PC when GPU prices drop back to normal.

Edit: I found the model of my two current monitors. I have 2 Acer H236HL currently hooked up at the moment.

[Denpepe]

Gsync is proprietary Nvidia tech and requires a module installed in the monitor to work. Freesync is free to use and uses Adaptive-Sync technology which is integrated into the displayport 1.2a (and above) standard and HDMI 2.1.
Basically, it doesn't cost anything extra for a manufacturer to enable Freesync capability in a monitor where as Gsync has a significant price premium.

I would like to add to that that G-sync is more of a fixed spec, while not all freesync monitors have the same range of when freesync is used so your mileage may vary depending on the implementation or panel used.