- Whoa, that's bright! 1600 nits peak brightness,ladies and gentlemen. (angels chanting) When we looked at the PA32UCX from ASUS a little over a yearago, we were impressed. 4K, 60 hertz, mini LED backlight, color accurate HDR with1200 nits peak brightness. It was a force to be reckoned with, and it was the answer toApple's Pro Display XDR, but for PC users. But then, ASUS being ASUS said, "ASUS, hold my beer," and now we've got this, their next generationProArt Display, the PA32UCG, or as we've been calling it,the god king of monitors. But, what exactly did they improve, and is it worth shellingout thousands of dollars for an upgrade? Do gamers even care abouta display this expensive? Will I ever get to my sponsor segue? Today's video is brought to you by NZXT. NZXT wants to make buildinga custom PC easier.
With their build system,just set a budget, see how the computer willperform with your favorite games and build takes care of the rest. Watch till the end ofthe video to learn more, or click the link down below. (upbeat music) For starters, the UCG,as we'll be calling it, has got the world's first 4K120 hertz mini LED IPS panel. It features a jaw-droppingpeak brightness of 1600 nits, which is good enough forVESA HDR 1400 certification. So, none of the fake-o HDR 2000 like we saw from Samsung'sOdyssey G9 a few months back. It's also got improved IO, featuring HDMI 2.1 support,as well as DisplayPort 1.4 with display stream compression. Now that improvement on peak brightness andrefresh rate is huge.
It's only 4K rather than 6Klike the Pro Display XDR, but hey, at least it comeswith a stand, am I right? Need to show the latestedits to your boss? Bam! Whoa, god, that's heavy,but it's easy peasy. And, can a Mac do this? Oh, that's bright! Well, yes, yes it can. But hey, now PC enthusiastsand professionals can do that too. And, this is really cool. If at the end of the day, you don't feel like leavingthe office quite yet, and you decide to play some games,
it is otherworldly. 4K 120 looks and feels amazing even with the 5 millisecondrated pixel response times, that is as long as you'renot hyper competitive. Because naturally, everythingthat makes this thing look beautiful for creatives who need it makes it beautiful in games. Another thing that's missing compared to a real gaming monitor is obviously higher refresh rates. I mean, something like the Odyssey G9 runs at 240 hertz ratherthan just 120 hertz. That extra little bit of smoothness, we have basically provenalready in separate videos that it does make a difference. So for competitive gamers,yeah, this probably ain't it. I am really, really impressed at the pixel response times though, considering this is not a gaming display. It is a full array localdimming backlit display, so even though they're mini LEDs and you've got 1,152 zones, it is still possible to find situations where you're gonna get halos around light objects on dark backgrounds. The thing is that when playinggames or watching movies, it's pretty hard to notice. Anyone see any haloing? 4K 120 hertz with perfect color, it's nice, really nice, but I don't know if I need it. Which takes us to the next big question. Who does? Well, in our first review of the PA32UCX, our main contenders wereeditors working in HDR who needed perfectly color accurate images and games developers.
Now this time around, it'ssimilar to the UCX offering with support for HDR 10,HLG, and Dolby Vision, and it delivers highly accurate color across a wide variety of color spaces. We're talking 100% sRGB, 97% DCI-P3, and 99.5% of Adobe RGB. But with the UCG, having the frame rate improvementsand updated connectors, well, the needle starts to sway a bit closer to game development, especially now thatthe latest gen consoles and graphics cards have madeHDMI 2.1 the new standard.That is a bit of a problem though, since to take advantage of this thing, you will need HDMI 2.1, which you will only findon NVIDIA's 30 series and AMD's 6000 series GPUs. Sorry, folks, DisplayPort 1.4 just isn't going to cut it anymore. We were able to get as far as 100 hertz, 10 bit RGBusing HBR3 transmission, but we needed chromasubsampling to reach rates like 120 or 144 hertz. And the visual anomalies thataccompany chroma subsampling, well, they can be okay for playing games, but they're not ideal for creating them.
Maybe once DisplayPort 2.0comes out and more than doubles the maximum bandwidth of DP,it'll end up back on top. But for now, HDMI 2.1at 48 gigabit per second is definitely the way to go if you want 120 hertz, 12 bitRGB with full dynamic range. Still though, the additionof display stream compression on DP 1.4 is a bonus overthe previous UCX model. Of course, to test itthen, we had to pair it with the only card wetrust in our editing den, the RTX 3090. We powered it up and ran ourCalman ColorChecker software using the included X-Rite i1Display Pro. A $260 value, by the way, which should at least helpjustify the cost of this thing. Right? Then we ran tests to compare against the includedfactory calibration report. What we found was that ourdisplay wasn't perfect. However, its inaccuracies were almost all below the level that thehuman eye can even discern with an average Delta E of less than 2. And while ours was a little bit off, we're confident that with alittle bit of calibration, this monitor will be an extremely accurate part of your workflow.
And besides, professionals should be periodically calibrating their displays because they can actually drift out of calibration over time. And there are some other things that would be owners should know. Remember when everything started getting lighter and cheaper? Well, not this guy. This is one hefty 32-inch monitor with a net weight of 14.6 kilos. That is just over 32pounds in freedom units or basically one poundper inch of screen space. And... oh my god, it is so heavy, and it costs a whopping 5,000 US dollars. It also takes up a hugeamount of desk space thanks to just how thick the housing is because of the coolingsolution that ASUS built in to reach that impressivesustained 1000 nits brightness. A monitor arm will help alleviate that, but this thing ain't noM1 iMac, that's for sure. The other major caveat isthat ASUS has another monitor that is mostly either onpar or actually better than the PA32UCG for gamers: the PG32UQX. It's hailed as the world's first mini LED gaming monitor by some, and it is $2,000 less than this one, and you get 4K 144 hertz, DisplayHDR 1400, 1400 nit peak brightness, and quantum-dot technologyfor true 10 bit color depth. For anyone who wants to primarily game while maintaining prettydang good color accuracy for a little bit of work,that's the better option. But, for anyone who wants that little bit of extra peak brightness and a much wider array of color spaces while creating HDR content, you're gonna have to stick with the UCG. So all hail, then, thenew god king of monitors. And all hail our sponsor NZXT. With NZXT's build system, getting a custom-builtPC is easier than ever.
Just set your budget, see how your PC will performin your favorite games, and build takes care of the rest. Their recommendation engineprovides benchmark data for the expected performance of your build at both 1080p and 1440p, and their FPS estimates are guaranteed to be accurate within 10%. You can customize and upgrade your build from various NZXT case optionsand RGB lighting setups, and they feature transparent pricing with a flat $99 assembly fee so you can spend less timeworrying about upgrade costs and more time gaming. With all your PC's components covered under one warranty plan, NZXT will manage any problems you have, and they've got live chat available for real time help and troubleshooting. Great news, by the way,for our Australian friends, all of this is now available to you. So go check out NZXT's build system today using the link in the video description. So how many of you areartists and game devs who have been eyeing this bad boy and waiting for the inevitable release that keeps getting pushed back? Are there any gamers out therewho want it just because? Let us know in the comments. And if you liked this video,check out our PA32UCX review so you can at leastcompare before you buy.
Comments
Post a Comment