 Ultra-wide monitors. This is not the first one I've seen, but it is the first I've seen that targets gamers so directly. Welcome to my video of the LG 34UM67. 🎵 Fractal Design listens, and the Define R5 case was made with feedback from you, the community. So click my face to learn more about that and give your feedback. So let's start by having a look at her physically, hmm? If you watched my video on the 34UM95 just under a year ago, you already know pretty much how this story goes. The stand is see-through, which is neat, but it's otherwise subpar since only its tilt and angle can be adjusted without removing and replacing the two screws that let you change the height a grand total of like an inch. And there's some unfortunate stuff at the back as well. That glossy plastic is going to do what glossy plastic does best, although we might have an idea for a solution. So make sure that you're subscribed for that video. And while the standard VESA mount and included sticker to protect the back of your monitor are welcome sights, folks who want to wall mount this puppy will need to buy low-profile angled connectors for anything but the second HDMI input. So the audio passthrough, HDMI 1, DVI, or DisplayPort ports. No USB hub back here, something I would have liked to see on such an expensive display as well. Moving around to the front, things get quite a bit better in a hurry. The bezel around the matte anti-glare coated 2560x1080 75Hz IPS panel is super slim, and LG's joystick for navigating the on-screen menu is present. And what an on-screen menu it is. It lacks an sRGB color profile, even though 99% sRGB coverage is a selling point on the monitor's webpage for some reason, but if you've got a calibration tool, the six axis color adjustments will let you take care of that easily. And just about anything else, you can set it to 6-bit or 8-bit color, adjust pixel response times, although as usual I found medium was the best compromise, and much better than older IPS panels by the way. You can tinker with their black stabilizer feature, which is similar to BenQ's black equalizer, a contrast reducing effect that makes it easier to see objects in shadows in games, without washing out all of the colors on screen. You can use any of the pre-configured gaming modes that monkey around with color, gamma, and sharpness, or you can make your own that you can switch to by pressing up on the joystick twice. And then you can enable and disable a couple of LG's other killer features for the 34UM67 as well. The first is DAS, or Dynamic Action Sync. This one is pretty simple. It's designed to reduce display lag, or the time between the monitor receiving a frame and displaying it on the screen. Usually this feature is labeled on TVs as a game mode, or similar, and results in dramatically worse image quality thanks to less pixel processing. But in the case of the 34UM67, I can't find any reason with my bare eyes to turn it off. It looked exactly the same to me. And the second killer app, compliance with the optional adaptive sync portion of the DisplayPort 1.2A standard and AMD FreeSync certification. This monitor supports dynamic refresh rate gaming, where your supported system can effectively tell the monitor when to refresh the image, eliminating the issues associated with V-Sync on, so that is stuttering and lag, and V-Sync off. That tearing effect where there seems to be a horizontal line through the image, where there's half of one frame and half of the next one on the screen at the same time. There are some caveats here though. In addition to a compliant display, you'll need a supported AMD dedicated or onboard graphics solution, you'll need a DisplayPort cable, curiously not included in the box, and you'll need a FreeSync compatible driver, so I used a Beta 1 provided by AMD for my evaluation of this monitor. Yes, friends, Nvidia graphics card owners will not be able to take advantage of the dynamic refresh rate of this monitor, unless Nvidia decides to go down the DP1.2A open standard route sometime in the future, instead of asking monitor vendors to buy their own G-Sync scalar chip, something that at this time is quite expensive and only supports DisplayPort input, but Nvidia claims will have other advantages down the line. We can talk about that when that comes, but first let's talk about the usage experience of this monitor. I still love ultra-wide for productivity, but I'm also still not super stoked on 2560x1080 for that particular use case. I found myself frustrated with the number of vertical pixels scrolling a lot, the same way that I always was way back in the day of the dinosaurs, when 16x10 monitors went out of fashion to be replaced by 16x9 1080p monitors, and this issue, for me, is made worse by the size of this display. Thanks to its IPS panel, contrast, color vibrancy, and viewing angles are non-issues, but with pixel density this low, even with no scaling, text looks abominable and no amount of low blue light reading modes made it feel comfortable for me to use, compared to its 3440x1440 Brethren, also from LG. But I understand why LG did it this way. They didn't really have a choice. From the marketing, this is a gaming monitor first, and productivity monitor second, and 3440x1440 is just about 80% more pixels than 2560x1080, which might make graphics card companies happy with all the video cards they'll be selling, just so folks can play games at native res, but might not thrill gamers too much. And in games, the pixel density bothers me a lot less. I don't find anti-aliasing unnecessary, like I did with Dell's 5K monitor, but 4xAA was a good balance between playability of very demanding games, like Crysis 3 at very high settings on an R9 290X, and image quality. Gaming on the screen this size is going to be immersive pretty much no matter how you slice it, and thanks to its very low lag, solid motion blur performance, and 75Hz panel, that really does make a big difference over 60, by the way. The 34UM67 is a pleasure to game on. But hold on a second, Linus, you didn't even mention FreeSync yet. You're right, I didn't, but I will now, here in the conclusion. In spite of this monitor's presence in AMD's FreeSync media materials, and the prominent logo on the box, I didn't find the implementation of FreeSync to be as useful as it can be in this case. But it took me a few hours, and a lifeline call to my buddy Ryan Shrout from PC perspective, to figure out why I was encountering stuttering and tearing with FreeSync enabled, when it was clearly working in AMD's Windmill demo. It's because this monitor's adaptive refresh rate window is from 48Hz to 75Hz, only 27Hz. That means, even if you enable FreeSync, with Vsync also on, the experience is pretty good, as long as your frame rates remain pretty high, other than the very slight input lag penalty, similar to Vsync, that is caused by capping your frame rate like that. And with it off, so with Vsync off, you'll actually still get tearing anytime your game runs above 75 FPS. And there's more bad news too. You'll get lag under 48 FPS, thanks to LG's selection of 48Hz, as the low-end cutoff of the adaptive refresh rate window on this monitor. But to be clear, this is not a knock-on FreeSync. There are monitors with much wider, like 100Hz plus windows, that go down to 40Hz, and the spec actually allows for windows as low as 9Hz, once panel technology improves. And it's actually not a condemnation of the 34UM67 as a gaming monitor either. Its size, IPS panel, and ultra-wide aspect ratio, along with its incredible responsiveness for considering all of those things, still make it a totally unique gaming experience. It just means that those two technologies didn't complement each other, as well as I was really hoping for in this case. So this is cool. We're giving away 31-month Xsplit professional codes. All you gotta do is enter in the form thread in the video description, and winners will be selected one week from today, April the 2nd. Pretty cool stuff! Not today, April the 2nd. On April the 2nd. Yay! Anyway, if you don't know what Xsplit is, it's basically a broadcasting software that, personally, I absolutely love. We use it every Friday for our live show. It allows us to change scenes, it allows us to take a wide variety of different inputs, and basically switch them around, move people around. We can import Skype callers, so that we can have people, you know, joining us for our podcast, or video podcast, as it were. And it's awesome for game streamers, especially when it's paired with Xsplit GameCaster. So there's Broadcaster and GameCaster. So GameCaster's great for gamers because it allows you to bring up a little overlay, so you can easily stop and start your stream, and all that kind of good stuff. And one of the coolest things about Xsplit is that it is absolutely free for the basic version. So all you gotta do is head over to xsplit.com slash Linus to start streaming and recording in HD today. So guys, thanks for watching. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, leave a comment, hopefully at the link in the video description to our forum, if you want to discuss it with our community members. Also linked in the video description, you can give us a contribution, you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, and you can change your Amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate code, so we get a small kickback whenever you buy stuff on Amazon, like maybe this monitor, for example. That kind of stuff helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe and follow, and all of that good stuff.