 So you can get some really cheap stuff on AliExpress. Ah! Monitor appears. Like this monitor. So we ordered this, what, like a month ago or something like that. It was cheap. It was only 200 bucks. And the reviews for it are fantastic. Oh wait, if you look closely here, those reviews are from Amazon. And they're not even for a monitor, for a monitor stand. So wait a minute. What even is this thing? Is it any good? And can you trust AliExpress at all? It doesn't look promising, but what we can promise you is that this video is brought to you by Thermaltake's A500 has a modern, minimalistic design, brushed aluminum panels, and dual hinge swing tempered glass doors. Check it out today at the link in the video description. So we already did the very cheap and the most expensive and the most expensive and the most expensive and the most expensive so we already did the very cheap feeling external power brick made by Dajing. HDMI cable, that is actually really nice to see included. Metal stand. Ooh, a sheet metal stand. This is really, ooh, this is, you know what? Functional. I like it. Having the screws already installed where they go is handy. I do wish that they weren't quite all the way in. Oh, it's curved. It's curved, baby. 3000R. That's interesting. So it's got actually, yeah, quite a tight curve on it. Another thing you can notice is this is not the brand name that was on the product page. And this appears to be just spray painted. At least it's straight. Yeah, but is it? Okay, so that's about, no, that's clearly four. No, it is not in fact level. It goes down this way. So you got your stereo speakers, HDMI, VGA. That's it, baby. Power in. No display port. Literally the very worst kind of on-screen display controls, the kind that's on the back. You're supposed to have one tactile bump. And the stupid part is it's not even a cost saving measure because it's not like they took one button and then just reused the molding for it. There's one molding for the entire back panel of the monitor. So it was just a stupid decision. It's like, this is what happens when you clone a product without understanding why they did it on the original product. So they probably saw a button that had a tactile bump, read a review somewhere that was like, yeah, helpful tactile bump on the button. And we're like, oh, well, they cheaped out. They only put one tactile bump. We're gonna do five. So you reach around behind the monitor and you don't know what button that is. You know what though? Major kudos for them having a VESA mount, even though I have absolutely no idea how exactly you would put a back plate on it. There's your screw again. Now watch how this works. Well, the table, you gotta lift it, lift it in. There you go. Here, I'll hold that for you. All right. Incredibly light. This is scarily light. Okay, in fairness to it, in spite of the cheap stand, the tilt adjust that it does have actually feels really solid. Like it's really firm. First impressions, not very strong. It's only 1080p. Yeah, it's fine. Is the whole thing crooked? Yeah, that's like 83. Like this is way off. It actually has a bit of like a screen door effect. I'm just looking at how there's like, there's a mesh. There's a grid that you can see just on a gray background, but like text looks like hot garbage. Oh, wow. This menu. There's graphics. Which one are we on right now? And what do the buttons do? Oh no. So it changes part of the frame according to the parameters you set here to look different from the rest of the frame. What even is this? Why? What is this feature? Who could want this? When I click the right side, it goes to the left. Like this, it goes this way through them. And when I click the left side, it goes this way. Warm user, oh, green is what I think they should call that one. That's custom though. sRGB. Okay, that seems fine. Cool. Normal. Enhance. Full, full sale here. On. What the hell? It must be, maybe you don't see it when you have s. No, no, I can see it. Full enhance off. Full enhance on. It's like saturating it. Yeah, it's saturating it ever so slightly. What the hell? What is this demoing? For a second, I thought maybe it was demoing like on or off for your color boost, but it's not. It's demoing if your monitor was actually broken versus if it wasn't. Maybe it's meant to be, you put like a before and after thing. So it's like, this is a inferior monitor and this looks like this and our monitor looks like that. That's not even remotely close though. Like you can't even look at this. Exactly, the competition pales in comparison. Like this is like what? Three bit color? Like you know what I mean? Cause you can see a big difference in like banding and in being able to see the discrepancies between the shades of gray. If you go from like a six bit to an eight bit panel or a 10 bit panel, right? So this, what monitor are they simulating here? Where you can't tell the difference between these colors. Input select. Input select is extra. That was, it fell by the wayside. That was a low priority. I mean, there's only two inputs. So by this point, it's pretty clear this monitor is terrible, but you guys can keep watching for just more pain train here, I think. So should CS go demo mode? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What even is this? It's all up here. No, like happy. I think it's all in here. Oh my God, it is. We can't even see the menu. Oh my God. Dishonest sales tactic mode. It's like, do you want to lie to your customers? Press this button. Oh, it's a bad guy. Can we turn demo mode off now and give this thing a fair shake? All right, let's do it. Let's do it. So I don't actually feel a discernibly large amount of input lag. Like, you know, if we whip out the makey makey or something and measure it, it might not be perfect. Which is what I did. It's not terrible. Are we going to be able to show these side by side? Cause this one's 4K and that one's super definitely not. I don't actually know if we can clone display a game like that. We might have to run this one at 1080. Okay, so they're both 1920 by 1080. They're both a hundred percent. Okay. Is it going to clone? But actually I don't remember ever trying to do this. Cool. It's not working yet. It's dull and lifeless. Let's be more fair. Let's be even more fair. Let's be as fair as we can. Let's try some different modes or something. Okay. Cause we're in sRGB mode, which is not like the most vibrant mode or anything. Oh my God. They're all awful. That's just pink. Go to normal. Very green. Okay. So we're resetting this to factory defaults. I'm getting pro. So yeah, it's pink. It's a pink monitor. You can really see it's not bright at all. Like the contrast is so low. Like this is brighter than this. This is darker here, which is what you want. And then this, like these bright spots where it's supposed to be bright white, it's just dull. It has no punch to it. So to be clear, we're comparing two monitors that would both have obvious differences between the image on their screen and a known subject, like someone you've seen in person many times. Well, you can see the actual and the drawn or rendered color right there. Right. But we're looking at it on these monitors, but we're talking an average Delta E of 5.54 and 7.16. So it's considered indiscernible to the human eye when it's sub two. So that's fascinating. So you wouldn't use out of these for color critical work, but I think if you're just a regular gamer, movie watcher, normal stuff, you're not gonna really care about either of those values. But meanwhile, actually using it, you hated this. It's so dim and it looked so green. Yeah, I hate it. Here's the thing. Just because the panel is made by a reputable manufacturer doesn't necessarily mean that they are to blame for a crappy image on it. Because the electronics that drive the panel, the tuning of the panel, the calibration of the panel, all of these things affect the final image, the quality of the backlight, the quality of the intermediate layers. There's really not much benefit to finding out who's responsible for the actual panel itself. I guess there's just an additional appreciation for that most monitors aren't this bad. Okay, there's one more thing we can test though. Sure. If you remember, we hated the speakers on that thing. We're happy that it came with them, I guess. They were really bad though, yeah. Could these speakers be worse? All right, let's find out. Do I really need any more than the Windows test tone to know that this sounds horrible? Here, just- That's not a good test. Bear with me, bear with me. No, just come over here. Just come over here and listen to it. It's obviously bad already. It's pretty bad. Okay, let's try the other one. Hold on. It's not picking it up. I think the Nvidia audio stream output thing can only do one at a time, so let's see if it picks up this one. Are you just messing with me? No, you think they're just grills and there's no real speakers in there? They're not picking up. I don't know if I ever heard them. Are you messing with me right now? No, no I'm not. Are you sure? Could they be fake? I'm pretty sure the product page also says it has speakers though. All right, so we're giving it another shot. Oh my God, there aren't speakers in it. Well. Speaking of good ideas, ending this video now because realistically you guys are no more likely to check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description than you were three or four minutes ago. And this video is brought to you by Massdrop and Sennheiser have teamed up to bring us the PC37X gaming headset. It features angled drivers and an open back design for a nice natural sound and better stereo imaging and those drivers actually come from the same family as the HD598 and HD600 series headphones. They come with a noise canceling microphone and they're available on Massdrop at the link below for just $1,999 for a limited time. Go check them out. So thanks for watching. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the other stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join. Seriously, I'd recommend anything in this video more than that except with the exception of maybe the Amazon basics gaming keyboard. That's not very good. Toss up there. No, no, it's better than this. It's just, I'm not really recommending it. At least it's cheaper.