 I'm having a pretty good couple of weeks here guys so Nvidia just sent over a Titan RTX to replace my old Titan X Maxwell graphics card so that upgrade is done, but I ran into a new problem my Predator X 34 is officially holding me back now with its 100 Hertz refresh rate fortunately the long awaited ROG Swift G35v is Finally here, it's a clear upgrade in every way It's 3440 by 1440 resolution still, but it is one inch bigger It's got HDR with G-Sync ultimate and it manages up to 200 Hertz refresh So it is finally time after a couple years of this being my reigning gaming monitor of choice to crack open and upgrade Oh That was not the way to open this But the way to segue into our sponsor is for me to tell you about Glassware with Glassware you can detect and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device Just head over to Glassware We're gonna have them linked in the video description and use offer code Linus to get 25% off Now I do want to get this cracked open right away But before I do that I should give you guys a bit of an update on what's going on with the personal rig so The old graphics card is still out But if you guys recall I actually changed out my CPU and Motherboard at the same time that I put in the Titan RTX except one small continuity error That's my old rampage 5 extreme with my 5960x in it So there was something I didn't think of back when I did the upgrade Optical Thunderbolt 3 cables, which is what the new motherboard used Don't exist yet Exist yet. So what I'm doing right now is even though I have all these cables run here is I'm actually back to using my Thunderbolt 2 connection With my old motherboard now as for the reason that I bring all of that up I left all this stuff in place because at this point I don't know if my Thunderbolt 2 Connection is going to be able to carry a DisplayPort 1.4 Signal which it will need to if it's gonna be able to do 200 Hertz at 3440 by 1440 So the good news is we've got all the different options and we're just gonna go with whatever works Oh, this thing is pretty heavy, isn't it? First impressions like right out of the gate here. This thing is really thick To ASUS's credit they've managed to thin up the bezels quite a bit compared to their 4k 144 Hertz gaming display Oh from this angle you guys also get a really good look at the curve. That is a tight curve 1800R Looking not too bad. I oh wise we've got HDMI but Even with HDMI 2.0. You're still limited to 3440 by 1440 100 Hertz then we've got DisplayPort here, which is 180 Hertz natively 200 Hertz overclocked our power in a USB 3 hub and then that's pretty much it Oh except for this so that is actually a headphone jack So what's notable here is that this is powered by a higher end amp and DAC than you would normally find integrated into a monitor So you can use it a couple ways you can pass through your audio from HDMI or DisplayPort Just like you normally would or if you plug in via USB, then you get higher definition audio or whatever the case may be personally, I don't find this to be a particularly big deal because From my perspective if you can afford a $2,500 monitor You can probably also afford a standalone amp and DAC So for me, I'm using an O2 headphone amplifier with the DAC built in then again The flip side of it is maybe you spent all of your money on this $2,500 monitor and you're very grateful that it has a better built-in headphone amplification solution All right now that we've got it assembled looks like we've got about now It looks about like about four or five inches of height adjust There's your tilt Here's your swivel and then there's no no pivot but you do have a little bit of adjustment just in case your desk is Not quite even We've got an ambient light sensor on the top So you can disable that but that can make it so that if your room lighting conditions change, then it'll adjust the backlight Speaking of backlights, there's lights on the back This is full RGB if you're into that sort of thing, but for me personally, I won't be seeing it. So Not sure if I care about that, but I do like having these controls on the back with the joystick type interface That is definitely my favorite way to interact with a monitor. Alright, so let's get this thing replaced. This is a lot heavier This thing is chunky. What is it the kids say now? Chonky? It's Chonky apparently This is a 280 watt power brick That's nuts I've plugged my DisplayPort passthrough into the back of my graphics card And I'm pretty sure this isn't gonna work But hey, you know It's worth a shot. All the good news is that the thick cable works. I don't know what what refresh rate though So I shut down the system we're gonna try a cold boot swapped out my standard cable for the one running through Thunderbolt and We're gonna see if it works at all and how far it'll go But something you guys need to keep in mind is that even if it works perfectly Just like their 4k 144 Hertz gaming display this one has some Some gotchas on the maximum resolution and refresh rate So if you want to run with no chroma subsampling so full 444 RGB color you're gonna be limited to 120 Hertz if you want 12-bit color 144 Hertz if you want 10-bit color and 180 Hertz if you want 8-bit color and of course at 8-bit color you cannot run HDR so the only way to go to 200 Hertz overclocked is to run 8-bit color again No HDR then if you're willing to use chroma subsampling so that's 422 You can actually run all the way up to 12-bit color at 200 Hertz But you're gonna get that fringing that many people complained about with the 27 inch 4k 144 Hertz wow this is just not working at all Okay, then I guess we're just gonna have to run this display port cable, and we're stuck with that then now the thing about Chroma subsampling is that while you'll notice it on text It's unlikely that many people will notice it in games so your mileage may vary it's worth trying out now Okay, we've got it fired up. We're kind of looking at it closely for the first time and it's Obvious that our viewing angles are not quite IPS like which kind of makes sense because this is a VA as opposed to an IPS panel Let's go ahead and see how far we can push the refresh rate With that cable going to the other room over there. Let's go straight to 200 Hertz I guess alright, so I'm seeing a little bit of motion blur on the trailing and leading edge of this window But it's far from the worst I've seen to its credit even though we're running at 200 Hertz this text is quite readable even while I'm moving it around Now to a Susan and videos credit actually on the static text This is at 200 Hertz 4 2 2 12 bit I can really I I honestly can't even tell but if I move it See that It starts to look kind of weird and like kind of brownie yellow as I move it around so Honestly for myself. I think I'd be far more likely to leave it on 4 4 4 and maybe try to hit the 144 Hertz refresh For that full quality, but still a significant upgrade in terms of refresh rate over my old one So now that I've settled on that we can go ahead and enable HDR which Happily doesn't make windows look like complete garbage when you're not in games anymore That's pretty nice, and we can go ahead and fire up steam Which is a perfect opportunity for us to have a look at the full array local dimming That's present on this monitor so unlike their previous 4k display which had 384 zones this one actually has 512 zones and they're all quite small only about two and a half centimeters square So what that means is that as a bright object moves around on the screen? The backlight behind it is going to brighten and then as a dark object moves around it will darken now in a synthetic situation like this you can see that the effect is Really not very convincing and making adjustments to it Like changing it to gradual for example Does not improve the situation at all it just creates kind of a hazy smear behind whatever you move around But the real test is not how it does moving the mouse around in steam, but rather how it handles actual games Okay, so shadow the tomb raider is almost ready to go which means we can talk about HDR gameplay now, but first Well, let's talk about HDR content consumption, so here's a video that was shot in HDR from our buddy Austin Evans I'm just gonna switch this over to yep there we go 4k HDR Does it work? Uh yeah, it definitely works, so it's VESA HDR 1000 certified which means it has to be able to do a thousand nits peak brightness in a small area or as a single flash across the whole screen and 600 nits sustained, but Asus says it can actually do 750 nits sustained now as far as just Consuming content on it goes I gotta say the full array local dimming Did not bother me at all as long as I'm viewing it from directly in front if you go off axis Yeah, that's a more challenging scenario, and I can definitely see the halos, but straight on it actually looks Really damn good, so this is fascinating. I was having a game launching issue, and I wanted to force close steam and And check this out. We're getting wicked fringing now, and it looks like it's actually related to HDR So even though I'm running 422 here we go 12 bit 144 Hertz even I bet if I even crank it to 200 Hertz We get no fringing without HDR unless we move it around See there you go You got to move it around to have any effect whatsoever, so this is it first time gaming in HDR at home 200 Hertz that's better smooth the sunlight looks really really natural compared to what you'd be accustomed to seeing in games and Even in the spots where we've got like a pretty significant contrast between a sunlight reflection and then something dark underneath it I'm not really getting a noticeable Halo or fringe around it that looks really sharp doesn't it one thing I'd like to try though is dialing it back to 144 Hertz no chroma subsampling so we're back at 444 10-bit color Honestly, I wouldn't say there's anything immediately noticeable this game does look really really good in HDR though So I could actually see myself dialing back the maximum refresh rate for games that are all about the visuals, but There are also situations where I wouldn't want to compromise on that at all, and I'd be willing to go to you know 8-bit or 422 subsampling or whatever the case may be and that's something like like a pixel precision you know platformer like super meat boy Yeah, he's super No question Kind of say I could get used to playing a game like this at 200 Hertz Nope Me crazy is driving me crazy Brandon, but as for my last game test actually the game that I Started this entire personal rig update over Over land I don't have an issue But this is the first game that we've tried today where the full array local dimming is noticeable when I'm mousing over the water and I would find that distracting so Yeah, this is the first situation where I would probably find myself wanting to go in and turn that off And I guess that's actually a perfect place to summarize my thoughts on this display. It's an incredible piece of technology I haven't even mentioned this yet But we validated a suces included color calibration report with Delta ease of two or less making it not just great for gaming But also content consumption and even content creation But both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness is the incredible degree of Customization that it allows so you can decide what color depth you want or whether you want chroma subsampling or whether you want to trade Off more refresh rate or less refresh rate or you want to run HDR or no HDR. Do you want to have? full array local dimming on or off if you're not using HDR and you can dial in exactly the experience you want on a per game basis But it also means that you have to have a pretty decent level of understanding of all the dials and knobs better at your fingertips now for me personally There's no going back at this point. It's just that if you're in the market for one of these make sure you set aside Maybe a couple hours to do some light reading in order to fully understand how to get the most out of it Speaking of getting the most out of things our sponsor fresh books fresh books is the all-in-one Invoicing solution for small businesses and freelancers that helps you be more organized more productive and get paid faster You can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster You can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games And you can take it with you on the go with their fully featured apps for iOS and Android So for an unrestricted 30-day free trial just go to fresh books comm slash tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in the how Did you hear about us section? So thanks for watching guys 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 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 definitely join You