 Compromises. Always compromises. I'm so sick and f***ing tired of compromises. What if someone just made a monitor that compromised nothing? I want ultra-wide, I want an IPS panel, I want a high refresh rate, I want high resolution. I want the works, I want the whole works. Presents and prizes and sweets and surprises and... Is that really what I sounded like? Okay, fair enough. But this isn't a movie, this is real life. I am not getting turned into a blueberry or drowned in chocolate or whatever. I am getting the Acer XR341CKA. A monitor that isn't perfect, but oh boy, we are getting really, really close. Corsair delivers real mech or nothing with their new Strafe mechanical keyboard featuring genuine German-made Cherry MX key switches. Click on this spot right here to learn more. Acer. You guys gotta look at how everyone else does this. You got your standard corporate site product page with inoffensive color scheme. Then you need to have a stylized sub-site for your gaming products that communicates the things that gamers care about in a direct fashion. I was blown away when the single most interesting specification of the XR341CKA, for me anyway, wasn't on the product page. I mean, to be clear, the stuff that is on the product page is pretty sick. We're talking 34 inches of gloriously curved, ultra-wide 21 by 9 aspect ratio screen here at my ideal resolution of 3440 by 1440. So no scaling required in Windows, but much sharper looking than 1080p at this size. A full sRGB color space capable LED backlit IPS panel with a 4 millisecond rated response time, perfect for gaming and content consumption. DC backlight control for zero flicker and reduced eye fatigue and whoa! Adaptive sync, aka AMD FreeSync if you go through the certification process, is included over the DisplayPort input. So say goodbye to the tearing associated with Vsync off my friends. Now hold on a minute Linus, you're saying there's something cooler about this monitor from a gaming perspective than the fact that it's the first curved 34 inch 1440p with FreeSync? Yes I am. This monitor runs at a maximum refresh rate of 75Hz. And if you don't think that's a big deal, you're wrong. The difference between 100Hz and 144Hz is possible, but difficult for me to perceive. By contrast, and I've talked about this recently on some of my gaming notebook videos, the difference between 60Hz and 75Hz is night and freaking day. Now some of you will know that while I use an LG 34UC97 at work, and I am such an advocate for ultra wide that LG sent me a 3D printed action figure of myself standing next to a bunch of ultra wide monitors, I'm still running an ROG Swift PG278Q at home. Because for gaming, the color fidelity and immersion trade off has not yet been worth it to me to have to deal with 60Hz refresh, screen tearing, and relatively slow response times. That all changes today. Gaming on this sucker is simply put freaking awesome. Would I recommend it to professional eSports competitors? No. They're still going to want to be using standard aspect ratios and are going to want every edge they can get, so bring on the 144Hz refresh rates and 1ms response times. But for folks who game simply for enjoyment, this is the best experience that I've had yet. Much better than surround with those bezels in the way. But I realize I've gotten ahead of myself a little bit here, I completely forgot to do an actual overview of the monitor. At the back we find buttloads of inputs, two full size DisplayPort 1.2s and a mini with two HDMI 2.0 ports, one of which is NHL compatible. A headphone jack and power for the external power brick and the uplink and four downlinks for the built in USB 3.0 hub round out the I.O. Also at the back we discover that VESA mount support is more than an afterthought, but you probably won't even need it because the monitor supports the essential ergonomic adjustments. Tilt and height adjust. But there is some disappointing stuff back here too. Glossy plastic never looks as good in person as it does on a product page, and the way the connectors stick straight out causes undue strain on them if you change the height of your monitor. Not to mention that the top DisplayPort lock can't be released without finding a skinny tool to help you. These kinds of things should have been caught at some point in the design process. Moving around to the front, the top and side bezels are thin, perfect, but I'm really not a fan of the two-tone chin bar. Bezels should be like children, as unobtrusive as possible unless I have a specific reason to interact with them. Which leads us to my next negative point. The on-screen display controls are among the worst I've ever encountered. The buttons aren't labeled, they're mushy, it requires three clicks to get into the menu. The only saving grace here, I think, is that there's almost no real reason to go in here for most people. The default settings on the monitor, normal overdrive, DP 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 enabled, low input lag mode, and even the default color mode are all pretty darn good. But can you quantify pretty darn good? Yes! For the first time ever, I actually can. Thanks to my brand new i1 Basic Pro 2, Spectrophotometer, and CalMan 5 Ultimate software, big thanks to those guys for providing this gear, by the way, I can say that while the XR341 CKA doesn't quite achieve the 100% coverage of the standard computer sRGB color space that it claims, it is damn close at 99.4%. And while our color checker test does reveal some deficiencies in orange and yellow accuracy, if we throw out a couple of outliers here, almost everything is sitting in the Delta E of 4 or less range, with a Delta E of less than 2 considered to be basically accurate. Grayscale performance looks pretty good to me as well, with a bit too much emphasis on blues, which is typical of all but the most high-end LED backlit displays, resulting in a cooler appearance and blacks getting crushed a little bit, but nothing too alarming. On the subject of backlight, there's some bleed in the corners, as seems to be typical of these curved monitors, but again, nothing that I would consider detrimental to the experience of using it, though your mileage may vary as mine is an early engineering sample. But I guess that's sort of this monitor in a nutshell. There is a lot of good here, with complaints that will not affect the usability day-to-day, and if you're willing to shell out its admittedly very expensive asking price, you may get another happy surprise too. Using NVIDIA's display overclocking tool, I was able to get 85Hz on this puppy. 85Hz! Ultra-wide 1440p! Be still, my fluttering heart! Only the lack of G-Sync prevents this from winning my coveted Editor's Choice Award, since NVIDIA currently has a stronger offering at the high end of their product stack, where buyers of this monitor are more likely to be shopping. But we should see that remedied shortly, if what I heard from a little bird is anything to go on. Speaking of birds, Crunchyroll is a site created by anime fans, for anime fans. They offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan, like Kuroko's Basketball 3 and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. I'm really gonna have to change that script at some point, because at some point those aren't gonna be like the newest shows, and they have a large collection of the most popular anime series like Naruto in one piece. All of the content on their site is professionally subtitled, and if you head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus, linked in the video description, you can get 30 days of Crunchyroll Premium for free. That means new shows within hours of airing, straight from Japan with professional subtitling, 1080p streaming, being able to stream anywhere on a variety of devices, like your phone, tablet, or game console, and the best part is if you decide you like Premium, then all you have to do is pay $6.95 a month to continue it. So head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus to check them out. Thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, I think you know what to do. But if you liked it, then please do press that like button. Consider giving us a contribution through our forum. Maybe change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. We have instructions on how to do that in the little cards in the eye up there. So that kind of helps us out a lot. I've kind of lost track of what I'm talking about. So now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So click that little button in the top right corner there to check out a pretty sick video where I build a computer inside a mini fridge. Whoo. See you next time.