 Hello and welcome to the first and possibly the final installment of what I'm calling James Tries Stuff for the first time. Today, I'm going to use whatever tools I can find just laying around to make the most pointless PC gaming setup possible. Hey look, what are these doing here? Three 49 inch 32 by 9 gaming monitors. Each one of these is designed to be an elegant standalone solution for achieving both a product activity and gaming benefits usually reserved for double or even triple monitor setups. But hey, I'm super naive. Why not connect all three of them to create a 180 degree semi-circle of pixel paradise. Builds.gg is at it again with the stock cooling showdown. Up to $4,000 and hardware prizes are up for grabs for the most highly voted systems and for people who simply vote. Click the link below to join. Welcome back. Step one is to get a computer, particularly one that has enough video out ports to connect one to one to each of your three monitors. Now it is possible to go from one display port to like a hub where you split off to other display port cables. That might be possible depending on the resolution of your monitors, but it's always better to have a dedicated cable, especially considering that display port is pretty janky at the best of times. I'm also using the highest quality cables that I could find because the display port spec actually is only built around a cable length of three meters, which is about precisely 9.8 feet. So if you're going to go beyond that, which you may well do considering that if you're using monitors this wide end to end, they're like 10 feet. If you need to go beyond 9.8 feet with a display port cable, the longer the cable, the higher quality they should be. For our computer, we're going to be using a Corsair One Pro because it has an RTX 2080Ti inside, which I know is capable of pushing all the pixels I need to these giant displays. So that's just one less thing to screw me over. The next thing you need is a bunch of monitors. Now ideally you would be using three identical monitors, at least with the same resolution and the same aspect ratio, but it does help if they're actually the same make it model because then they're going to have the same sync polarity and more uniform colors across all of it. We don't have that here today. What we have, although these are each of them, 32 by 9, 49 inch monitors, they're three different brands. We've got an LG, a Dell, and a Samsung behind me. The Samsung has a resolution of 3840 by 1080 and a refresh rate of 144 Hertz. While the other two, although they do share the same LG made panel, which is a bonus, they have a resolution of 5120 by 1440 and a refresh rate of 60 Hertz. So we're just going to have to find out if this mish mash screws us in the end. The first thing I'm noticing here is that this is kind of stupid. These are already so wide that I don't know if it would be practical for basically anybody's workflow to have them arranged like this. The other thing I'm thinking about here is the keyboard and mouse. If I'm over here, it's a little awkward, especially if these were turned in more and I was more surrounded, it would be a little weird to be typing over here and cranking my neck this way. I got an idea. Okay so I found some scrap extruded aluminum that we had from 16K gaming and I've never used this stuff before, but Alex said it's pretty easy to work with. Okay now for the piece de resistance. That's more like it. Now that our setup is completely ridiculous, let's try actually gaming. Follow me! Okay so you'll see we're only using one third of our potential girth here so that's no good. Go into the settings, the resolution, 5120 by 1440 is the resolution of one of these. If I go into windowed mode, nope, no option to do that. Okay I think it's time we opened the Nvidia control panel. Okay so the point of surround is to make your computer think that you have just one monitor with one resolution. Okay let's play it safe and start with just two of our monitors. One by two, we'll pick the LG and the Dell. So 10,240 pixels, ugh, that's the width of those two screens. It's created one combined resolution because it's going to treat it like it's one monitor. Very cool. So let's see if we can get it to do that with all three monitors. We're going to change our topology to one by three, select every monitor including the Samsung. Okay so I was expecting what, like 12,000? This is 5760 by 1080. If I go to calculator and divide that by three monitors, 1920. It's treating this like each one of these is 1920 by 1080. I think it's because you're not allowed to mix and match resolutions. So I mean we can try this. Wow. Stretch city. Okay, this is kind of cool and immersive. It's not working properly, but I don't think it's because of the 1920 surround error thing. I think it's because this game is just not meant to do this. See how it gets really stretched out on the sides like that car. And the car looks really close. When I go like this, it looks a lot farther away. And that's because this game is rendering with only one camera position. Games that are meant to be played like this, they're going to render from multiple camera positions and then the result is going to be that teammates don't look like that. Oh boy. Good God. Good gravy. Can I knife people in this game? Okay, okay. Let's get out of here. What if I forced all of these to be the same resolution? So one way I could do that, which would suck, would be to just run my higher res ones at a lower res. So I'd run them all at 3840 by 1080. That's not that cool because why did I buy or have sent to this company higher res monitors? So instead we're going to try to super sample the low res one to render as though it is 5120 by 1440. There are some drawbacks, even if you can get surround to work. Like let's say I had monitors that were all the same and surround worked for me and it was awesome. There's still some drawbacks because it makes it seem like it's all one monitor, which is not ideal when you're not gaming. If I'm just using my desktop and it's treated like one monitor, then when I go to maximize one of my windows, for example, you're going to have like a windows explorer window that's just like eight feet of white and it's not easy to just place a window on only one monitor, for example. And like your clock's going to be way over there while your windows start menu is way over there. For that reason, a lot of people who game with surround on will actually turn it off when they're not gaming and then turn it back on when they go to game again, which sucks because it actually takes anywhere between one and five minutes to get it all configured every time. Now, a lot of these problems can be mitigated or outright solved by using software like Ultraman or display fusion, which is way better because then you can just stay in surround mode all the time and not have to go back into the display settings like I have to right now and move stuff around. Okay, let's see if this worked. I go into my windows display settings. I now have a new resolution for my crappy monitor, my crappy thousand dollar awesome monitor. So now we're going to go back into surround and see if we can get the coveted 15,360 horizontal pixel resolution that we were looking for. No. There's just no, there's no making it work. You can't even trick it. Who cares because we still might be able to get the result we want. Sure. It's not going to be exclusive full screen in our games. We'll take a slight performance hit, but we can still have lots of fun. So let's try some other games that are designed to be used in setups like this. I'm going to look at a list of games that are actually known to work with widescreen. Far Cry 5, we have that one. This intro sequence is a far cry from being enjoyable. Options, video. Text ratio custom, window mode, windowed. All the way, all the way. Oh, whoa. No, no. Okay now I think I'm going to try just running the benchmark because I don't want to get caught in the 20 minutes of cut scenes this game starts with. Nice. Nice. Those hay bales aren't really even stretched. Yeah, they're closer, but it's not super distorted. Things look proportional. This is pretty dank. I don't have to look over there, but having it there is more immersive. All right, enough Far Cry. Now I want to try a racing game naturally. I heard that Project Cars 2 is pretty good for this kind of thing. So options. Holy cow, look at this. I don't even have to go into video. There's a button specifically saying triple screen, configure your settings to match your triple screen setup. Hell yeah. Triple screen spanning. Check. These are probably wrong, but I'm going to say that's fine. Okay. And again, you can see on the text of Toyota, it's not stretched out, right? Okay, this is pretty sweet. Oh, look, one hand. Wow, man, that rear view mirror is like the same size as my actual rear view mirror in my car. This is like almost life size. This is pretty cool. And just like real life, I go the wrong way. Okay, this was a pretty stupid setup, but I still learned a few things. Number one, if you're into widescreen surround gaming, then make sure that the games you want to play actually support it because it really comes down to the games more than anything. If you're into racing games and flight sims, then you're probably good to go. And I think more and more regular mainstream shooter type games are supporting it because 21 by 9 monitors are more mainstream, but this aspect ratio is still kind of rare. And then getting three of them is dumb. Number two, make sure all of your monitors are the same resolution and aspect ratio because that caused headaches. Like we just have fewer options because we have the setup that we do. And number three, is this worth it? This particular setup with these monitors, is this the good way to go? I don't think so because first of all, it's super expensive. Yes, it's more immersive, but for the cost, like this is $4,500 worth of monitors. Is it really that much more immersive than just having, I don't know, one of them? They don't really have a very tight curve. That's an 1800R curve one. If you had three monitors, this aspect ratio that had 1800R curves, then it would be a tighter circle around you. But hey, if it's all about dick measuring, then this gives you a huge dick. So speaking of things that are awesome to have in your life, here's Linus with a sponsor spot. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design, business, technology, and more. And their premium membership gives you unlimited access to high quality classes on must-know topics so you can improve your skills, unlock new opportunities, and do the work that you love. Skillshare is more affordable than most learning platforms out there with an annual subscription costing less than $10 a month, and the first 500 of you to use the promo link in the description will get your first two months for free. So go check it out now. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, then you can hit that button. But if you liked it, like it, get subscribed, check out the links in the description to where to buy the stuff that we featured in this video. Also down there is our merch store where you can buy merch unlike anything I'm wearing at all, and check out our forum, which you should totally join.