New Year Resolution!!

We should meet up sometime, we used to play Boderlands 2 (dunno if you recall)
"You will blow through your data cap quickly seeing and showing off all the 4k demos and videos on youtube."
Looks like I want to tag along with you to blow up his data cap :p
 
Got the monitor a couple of hours ago, set it up and played around with stuff for a bit. Here are my initial thoughts:

TLDR is that it is clearly going to be a love-hate thing for a long time to come with this display - the monitor itself is very nice - I mean with the whole 4K/UHD experience.

First thing I checked (that I was worried about) was backlight bleed/glow and any dead/stuck pixels, thankfully at the moment no issue with the pixels but there is the (expected?) minor bleed on the bottom left and right corners and some glow, I guess, across most of the screen. But this is only really noticeable with fully/mostly black images in a dark room. It's about the same as I had with my old TN monitor so I'm used to it.

Compared to my previous 24 inch TN panel at 1920x1200 this one gave me a satisfying "wow factor" as soon as I booted up into the OS selection screen (GRUB) and into Win10 and linux, both the combination of IPS LED screen and UHD resolution, the UI, text, images, (mostly) videos look crisp, clean and, well, delicious haha. Almost as good an experience as it was moving from non-HD 17 inch LCD to 24 inch full-HD nearly 9 years ago.

Side note, my previous monitor rated power consumption was 50 watts while this one is only 29 watts.

Couple of minor annoyances is the silver colour metallic looking border/band around the edges of the screen, I would have preferred a fully black border. Other annoyance is the stand curved base legs juts out a couple of inches in front of the monitor and are quite wide, so my desk is currently cramped with the mousepad in a tight spot. But you can call these nitpicks.

The stand is definitely an improved one (VESA mounted) than the probably earlier one (which looked flimsy screwed on to the lower base of the screen) you might see in some reviews which people complain about breaking/not very adjustable etc, like @Jc36 mentioned. Again, as you already mentioned, there are some annoyances with UI elements like buttons, text sizing etc so some tweaking/custom settings are needed here and there.

The border/bezel is quite narrow but not too narrow, which is good for me, because I have a logitech webcam that sits on top and doesn't obstruct the display.

Sadly, it's looking like my Skylake CPU alone isn't capable enough to properly handle UHD resolution to push even 2D graphics like scrolling/moving/resizing/maximising/minimising application windows on either Win10 or linux.

Probably need to move to Kabylake/H270 mobo (or get an RX 460 GPU) with DisplayPort for full 4k@60hz display - I'm currently stuck at 24hz due to only having an HDMI 1.4 port on my mobo. Will think about it for a couple of months before doing anything about it and hopefully that will improve the 4k/UHD experience for me.

Using VLC player some MP4 (AVC/x264) videos which were playing smoothly on my full-HD display are tending to drop some video frames in 4K. HEVC was always a lost cause. Though the 4K videos on Youtube seem to be playing fine but not as buttery smooth as it was on on even 30hz let alone 60fps.

Overall, very happy with getting this monitor, I'm just nitpicking the faults - and there is some room for improvement by moving to a 60 hz capable CPU or GPU.

I should say watching those 4k/UHD videos is the best part of all this, all that glorious detail for the eyes to behold!
 
Hey congratulations!

cramped with the mousepad in a tight spot

This is the exact problem I am gaving haha.

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Try to get a cheap card, it will be much cheaper and less of a hassle than changing the whole cpu/mobo combo. A second hand 750ti/760 will be enough for desktop 4k usage and won't cost more than 5-6k. Besides, Kaby Lake isn't that much of an upgrade over Skylake.
 
Thanks! Congrats to you too!

Yup, I'm only looking for a smooth desktop UI and video playback experience, no 3D/gaming etc - plus Linux experience is important to me as much as Windows, so nvidia is to be avoided IMO.

Will take some time to mull over my next upgrade, whether moving to kabylake/H270 with a DisplayPort to get up from 24 hz to full smooth 60 hz refresh rate is enough (and worth the hassle) or, second option, not optimal, is to simply add an AMD RX 460 GPU - which probably will have good enough built-in open-source driver support in linux - will search/ask around the internets to figure this out over the coming days/weeks.

CPU/mobo upgrade will probably cost me around 7-8k (considering if I can sell my existing 1-year old skylake CPU+mobo at a decent price) while adding an RX460 will probably cost around 10-12k.

Hope you're enjoying your display more than me :D Cheers!
 
Well, the more I read about it, this monitor seems like a good buy, surprised this didnt come up in any of the review videos, would have probably gone for a Korean monitor. In any case, I am apprehensive about going 4k, will drive up the GPU costs.
 
Well, the more I read about it, this monitor seems like a good buy, surprised this didnt come up in any of the review videos, would have probably gone for a Korean monitor. In any case, I am apprehensive about going 4k, will drive up the GPU costs.

You may also wait a while, a lot of 4k panels will be coming out this year, should drive the price of this below 30k. But yes, modern games will be absolutely slaughtered by any top current gpus at 4k. Older games though are a joy to play. Currently playing Mass Effect 3 at 4k, it's very enjoyable to see the tack sharp images.

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Just to write down an update here: I added an AMD Radeon RX 460 GPU and everything is smooth and slick now.

Ordered it off PrimeABGB website couple of days back for just under 11k for the MSI brand 2GB model, got it around lunch time today.

Windows 10 booted into low graphics mode but automatically downloaded and installed a slightly older version of the AMD drivers. I anyway downloaded the latest off AMD website (MSI website seemed to also have a bit outdated version). VLC started crashing for some 4k vids, so installed MPC-HC player which is working well. Other stuff looks sorted.

For Linux, since I use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS based distros (elementaryOS and KDE Neon) the RX 460 is not yet supported by the current 4.4 kernel and Xorg window server so only the software based graphics (unaccelerated) worked by default. Good thing is that the next update 16.04.2 coming apparently on the 19th this month (or next month possibly) includes proper AMDGPU built-in drivers for good support of Polaris 10/11 based GPUs like the RX 460. Anyways, I installed the pre-release packages and things are working well (including VLC playback) on Linux too.
 
Haha I had a feeling you wouldn't take long to get a card. Don't forget to enable Freesync. You should also do a thread with the new GPU and monitor, it's a very good 4k for beginners combo.
 
lol yeah, the constant mouse movements and web page scrolling both being jittery caused me to get the GPU quickly :D

I have that Chimei Inn video downloaded too, along with a LG demo video and a few other short clips, all look sweet.

Too lazy to create a full new separate thread but I guess we'll be glad to answer any queries if anyone has them for us.

One YT video (the channel itself it nice) I like a lot is:

 
Windows scaling is also not as good as Macs. You need to scale the display, then set zoom levels in browsers and also change the font size in advanced display options. It takes some work, but 4k is relatively new and with time all these will be fixed.

DPI scaling in Windows 10 is messed up, its well known, Windows 10 uses a different scaling method than Windows 8 and Win 7.

I also faced blurry fonts when scaled up on Win 10. I have found a solution to this.

An app called “ XPExplorer - Windows 10 DPI Fix ” solves this problem by reinstating the old Windows 8 method of DPI scaling.


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See the difference with and without this tool, both at 150% scaling -

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Download link - http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.html

Revert every custom setting to default before using this.
 
Just to write down an update here: I added an AMD Radeon RX 460 GPU and everything is smooth and slick now.

Ordered it off PrimeABGB website couple of days back for just under 11k for the MSI brand 2GB model, got it around lunch time today.

Windows 10 booted into low graphics mode but automatically downloaded and installed a slightly older version of the AMD drivers. I anyway downloaded the latest off AMD website (MSI website seemed to also have a bit outdated version). VLC started crashing for some 4k vids, so installed MPC-HC player which is working well. Other stuff looks sorted.

For Linux, since I use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS based distros (elementaryOS and KDE Neon) the RX 460 is not yet supported by the current 4.4 kernel and Xorg window server so only the software based graphics (unaccelerated) worked by default. Good thing is that the next update 16.04.2 coming apparently on the 19th this month (or next month possibly) includes proper AMDGPU built-in drivers for good support of Polaris 10/11 based GPUs like the RX 460. Anyways, I installed the pre-release packages and things are working well (including VLC playback) on Linux too.


are your happy with Linux actually what kind of program and software your do use mostly for work and not interested it windows
 
@Arun.P can you clarify or rephrase your question because I'm not really sure what you're asking :)

Are you asking am I happy with Linux in general, or specifically related to this monitor and resolution?

Also are you saying you are not interested to know about Windows or are you asking why I am not interested in Windows?

To try and answer your question: Yep, quite happy with Linux stability especially both the "elementary OS" distro desktop UI/programs and also the "KDE Neon" distro UI and programs in general, and also it's pretty good with scaling in 4K resolution. In elementary OS which is based on GNOME I have not spent much effort , just scaled the display to double the size to it looks OK. In KDE its a bit better you have options to scale the display as a whole and also the fonts in the UI.

I mostly do web browsing using Firefox and Chrome on linux/windows haha and this is a home PC so I dont really do much "work" on it. Sometimes when I get bored I open up terminal or some source code editors like Visual Studio Code, or KDevelop, or Eclipse and make some small modifications to code and recompile on my machine, usually open source software (C++ mainly).

Let me know if you need further clarifications or I didn't get something right...
 
@vishalrao no offense just asking about what your like at your feeling about Linux and windows depend on using it everyday
which i am asking that your are not interested in windows
 
@Arun.P oh :) certainly no offense taken!

yes i find linux pretty decent and stable for everyday usage, browsing, office document editing (LibreOffice program) , viewing videos/music (youtube or VLC player), downloading torrents, scanning/printing off my HP all-in-one etc. i do keep win10 dual boot because i rarely need to go to windows (for example to run itunes for my office iphone, or even my Win10 Lumia phone device recovery tool). its not that im not interested in windows, (i dont care about win10 bloat or privacy issues) but more interested in running linux for everyday usage.
 
@vishalrao you were ready to pay 4-5k more to purchase from Amazon?

I'm in Pune where I could not get it locally (tried a few places for a few days) and amazon had it listed "amazon fullfilled" (turns out it was shipped from bangalore itself!) so yeah didn't have much choice about the extra 4k cost :(

Locally the stores employees were least bothered even when I asked them I am ready to pay a deposit if they can order the piece (Reliance Digital, Vijay Sales, Croma).
 
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