 Oh, that's bright. 1600 nits peak brightness, ladies and gentlemen. When we looked at the PA32UCX from Asus a little over a year ago, we were impressed. 4K, 60 Hertz, mini LED backlight, color accurate HDR with 1200 nits peak brightness. It was a force to be reckoned with, and it was the answer to Apple'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 generation ProArt 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 shelling out thousands of dollars for an upgrade? Do gamers even care about a display this expensive? Will I ever get to my sponsor Segway? Today's video is brought to you by NZXT. NZXT wants to make building a custom PC easier with their build system. Just set a budget, see how the computer will perform with your favorite games and build takes care of the rest. Watch till the end of the video to learn more or click the link down below. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. For starters, the UCG, as we'll be calling it, has got the world's first 4K, 120 Hertz mini LED IPS panel. It features a jaw-dropping peak brightness of 1600 nits, which is good enough for VESA HDR 1400 certification. So none of the Faco HDR 2000, like we saw from Samsung's Odyssey G9 a few months back. It's also got improved IO featuring HDMI 2.1 support, as well as DisplayPort 1.4 with DisplayStream compression. Now that improvement on peak brightness and refresh rate is huge. It's only 4K rather than 6K like the Pro Display XDR, but hey, at least it comes with a stand, am I right? Need to show the latest edits to your boss? Bam! Whoa, God, it'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 enthusiasts and professionals can do that too. And this is really cool. If at the end of the day, you don't feel like leaving the office quite yet and you decide to play some games, it is otherworldly. 4K 120 looks and feels amazing, even with the five millisecond rated pixel response times. That is as long as you're not hyper competitive. Because naturally everything that 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 rather than just 120 Hertz. That extra little bit of smoothness, we have basically proven already 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 local dimming backlit display. So even though there are many 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 playing games 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 were editors working in HDR who needed perfectly color accurate images and game developers. Now this time around, it's similar 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 improvements and updated connectors, well, the needle starts to sway a bit closer to game development, especially now that the latest gen consoles and graphics cards have made HDMI 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 find on Nvidia's 30 series and AMD's 6,000 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 RGB using HBR3 transmission, but we needed chroma subsampling to reach rates like 120 or 144 Hertz. And the visual anomalies that accompany chroma subsampling, well, they can be okay for playing games, but they're not ideal for creating them. Maybe once DisplayPort 2.0 comes out and more than doubles the maximum bandwidth of DP, it'll end up back on top. But for now, HDMI 2.1 at 48 gigabit per second is definitely the way to go if you want 120 Hertz, 12 bit RGB with full dynamic range. Still though, the addition of display stream compression on DP 1.4 is a bonus over the previous UCX model. Of course, to test it then, we had to pair it with the only card we trust in our editing den, the RTX 3090. We powered it up and ran our CalMAN color checker software using the included X-Rite i1 display pro, a $260 value by the way, which should at least help justify the cost of this thing. Right? Then we ran tests to compare against the included factory calibration report. What we found was that our display wasn't perfect. However, its inaccuracies were almost all below the level that the human eye can even discern with an average Delta E of less than two. And while ours was a little bit off, we're confident that with a little 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 32 pounds in freedom units, or basically one pound per inch of screen space. And, oh my God, it is so heavy. And it costs a whopping $5,000 US. It also takes up a huge amount of desk space thanks to just how thick the housing is because of the cooling solution that ASUS built in to reach that impressive sustained 1000 nits brightness. A monitor arm will help alleviate that, but this thing ain't no M1 iMac, that's for sure. The other major caveat is that ASUS has another monitor that is mostly either on par 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, display HDR 1400, 1400 nit peak brightness, and quantum dot technology for true 10-bit color depth. For anyone who wants to primarily game, while maintaining pretty dang 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, the new God King of monitors. And all hail our sponsor, NZXT. With NZXT's build system, getting a custom built PC is easier than ever. Just set your budget, see how your PC will perform in your favorite games, and build takes care of the rest. Their recommendation engine provides 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 options and RGB lighting setups, and they feature transparent pricing with a flat $99 assembly fee, so you can spend less time worrying 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 are artists 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 there who 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 least compare before you buy.