 Despite the fact that I could bring home pretty much any TV I wanted from our studio, I'm actually still using the first generation LG Signature OLED that I set up in here about two years ago. The industrial design looks absolutely perfect in my living room, and while OLED technology has actually come a long way in that time, the image quality on it is like already good enough for me. But, even though I am the kind of person for whom OLED was pretty much made, I've come to a realization. That screen over there is actually the primary gaming display in this house. So my son's not allowed to play mobile games. I find very little time to cloister myself away in the office upstairs, so I do most of my gaming here, which means we actually game here more than we watch movies or TV. So, this is the ROG Swift PG65U, Asus' big format gaming display, or BFGD. Let's see if it can take over my living room. Private Internet access. That's exactly what you'll get with PIA, a safe and protected IP, and it's got loads of other features as well. Check it out at the link in the video description. Now, the funny thing about this product is you guys might actually remember seeing it on our channel months ago, but it's only just now making its way to retail shelves, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that Asus felt like they needed a little bit more time to cook it, and two is that they were actually working on some really cool features. So something that the PG65U has that other BFGDs don't is the ability to run variable refresh rate not just on the display port input for PC, but also on the HDMI input if you're more of an Xbox gamer, for example. And this is some of the heaviest, most dense foam that I have ever encountered. Look at this. Whoa, okay, well, I shouldn't step on just one side. Well, that's better. Look at that. It is barely even compressing. Someone worked hard on that little piece of paper, but we don't care. Is this an included calibrator? You know what I think this is, is an ambient light sensor. Ah, so this is another thing Asus was working on. In our review of HP's BFGD, we weren't that impressed with the fact that it uses its integrated Nvidia shield as the only controller for the TV. So this one has a separate TV controller. The flip side of that, though, is that the ROG Swift doesn't have an integrated Nvidia shield. Actually, I'm gonna have to take off my sweater. I think I'm getting a little warm. LTTstore.com. So it actually has the stand on it already. That's nice, but it does make it a bit of a challenge to get out of here. Oh, boy. Oh, not all of how dark my shirt is right now is sweat. Some of it is rain. It's raining out there. See, this box is wet. Evidence that it was raining. Okay. Oh, there we go. Okay. Man, I gotta say one thing about these BFGDs is that it's kind of like going back in time. This is pretty thick. The good news is that for my setup, it doesn't matter because I have to have a large console down here anyway. So it makes no difference for me. But for some people, that might be a consideration. So it uses a nipple style navigation joystick over here. But then it also has these other four buttons, which I guess we'll investigate later. Power switch, power input. There's the integrated USB 3 hub. It's got... Wow, this is really nice. It's actually got four HDMI inputs, which is great. Display port in and optical audio. I figured out what that thing is. There's a dedicated Aura Sync USB port here. It's an RGB light. Well, then we might as well install it. Shadow. Honey, that's the base amount. So yes, the nice people on YouTube do need to know about the base amount on the back, but you don't need to pod it. Thank you. Oh, thank goodness. I actually wasn't sure what type of remote they were using. I use a Logitech Harmony. And it occurred to me that this thing is so new, it might not have all the code. So this is going to be a little bit of tedious reprogramming, but that's OK. Sorry, bud. You've served me well. Guess it's time for you to go out to pasture, though. Now, one thing I have immediately noticed here that is going to be a bit of a downgrade is that this TV does not have any type of analog inputs. So I don't think I have anything plugged into my component cables back there, but it just means I'm not going to have that option. Now, the BFGT, I had kind of accounted for moving on my own. This one, with its integrated soundbar and everything, I kind of haven't. I will try not to break it, but if I break it, it better be on camera. All right, I'm going to stash this over here. Oh, OK. That wasn't too bad. Sweet. Oh, that is some dust. And it's gone. Am I high enough? Oh, yeah. It's a little up. All right. Yeah. OK. There you go. Oh, OK. Dash. No, no. Oh, weird. I just realized this TV doesn't have an Ethernet port because it doesn't have an Nvidia shield. That makes sense. So it's not a smart TV. Wow. It's got a cooling fan in here. When I plug this thing in, it went... Not actually a feature that's desirable for television, but... One thing that's giving me pause already is the very gamer-y aesthetic. Now, this, I have been over for a long time when it comes to monitors, but this is my living room. I think I'd probably have to wall mount this thing in order to feel like it doesn't look kind of stupid. Like, just these little red accents on the bottom here, the ROG logo. Doesn't make sense. Shoot. I forgot that my gaming PC in the living room is actually running a mere 980 Ti. Now, that's still a pretty decent graphics card for most applications, but if you're gonna have any hope of running 4K high refresh rate, it is woefully inadequate. Oh, wow. This is actually kind of a janky rig. I haven't worked on this in a while, and I forgot. So physically, it looks like an RTX 2080 Ti is gonna fit in here, but this is only an Antec TruePower 550 power supply. It also occurs to me now that back when I built this, a 4th Gen Core i5 was a pretty decent gaming processor. Ah, you've served me well, 980 Ti VR Edition, with the special HDMI port on the back. So, there's only one solution. Bring my gaming rig with the RTX Titan in it down to the living room, and spend some real quality time with this thing tonight. I will know for sure whether it's worth putting the clearly significant amount of effort that it's gonna be into switching to this thing. Alright, so I spent the night with this puppy, and I ran into a lot of problems. This needs to be wall-mounted, like being able to see the back of the stand and some wires back here and stuff like that. It's not tidy. It's gotta go on the wall. I didn't even think of this before I started, but the optical audio cable has been basically obsolete for about 10 years now, ever since Blu-ray and the HD audio formats that came with it started appearing in the wild, because there's no standard for it, cannot carry HD audio. The way you get HD audio from whatever's playing it to whatever's supposed to be making the noises in the airwaves is over HDMI. You go out from your source, so in this case it's a computer, into your AV receiver, which is then plugged into your multi-channel speaker arrangement. Except we aren't using HDMI. We're going DisplayPort directly into the TV, and we need audio to go to the receiver some other way. So one idea I came up with was to set up my receiver as kind of like a phantom secondary output and clone the output from my DisplayPort TV to my receiver. So you can see I'm plugged into the aux jack at the front here, and we've got our two displays cloned, and actually everything here looks like it's gonna go just fine until we go into the Windows HD color menu and... Womp womp. When you're cloning, there is no way to enable HDR. Ahhhh. So you'll see what happens here is when I set these to not clone... Oh no no no, why is to the primary display? I was playing around with this all night last night, and I couldn't get HDR enabled on this display, even when they were extended. It just kept... I kept hitting the box, and it kept saying, would you like to apply this change? And I said, yeah, and then the box would just go back to where it was. Yes, the audio is working correctly over my speakers. You hear that wicked coil whine coming out of my desktop machine? I never noticed because it sits in a closet by itself, but it seems to be coming from the Titan. Yeah, I know, that's how I feel about it too. I am so happy right now. I don't know why it didn't work last night, and I don't know why it's working now, but... Oh, ow. So that's great. That was actually the biggest problem that I had no way to solve, because while it is a pretty kludgy solution, I found this great app in like two minutes called... What is this? Dual monitor tools. It allows you to lock your cursor onto a single screen on boot up, so you don't have to run around and reconfigure it. Freaking awesome. And thanks to my Logitech Harmony remote, no one else in my family has to know about all this kludgy nonsense, because I can just go, okay, when we're ready to watch PC, the receiver fires up, it switches to this input, we have the TV turned on, how it would work. ASUS has not apparently gotten in touch with Logitech, so the PG65U is not in their database for their Harmony remotes, which wouldn't be a problem, because you can actually train your Harmony remote using your existing remote, if your existing remote doesn't kind of suck. ASUS was pretty proud of their better remote experience compared to HP, but better means like three more buttons, apparently. So there's a number of functions that I would need in order to integrate this with my Harmony setup that I don't have. First is dedicated power on and off buttons. A power toggle means that if the IR signal ever gets missed, you get out of sync, so it starts firing up your receiver and turning off your TV, and then vice versa, every time you try to start a scene. Number two is it needs dedicated buttons for the inputs, not just an input selector button that works once in a while, and then scrolling through the inputs. Why can't I roll over once I get to the end of a menu? That's just basic stuff, you guys. And also these programmable buttons, while a really good idea in theory that would have allowed me to train my Harmony remote with all those functions, can only do a couple of things. Brightness, input select, game plus, and game visual. Why would input select be one of them? I already have an input select button, and I haven't even gotten into the issues with movies yet. Now I did say we game more on this TV than we watch movies, but that doesn't mean that we don't watch movies. And this one isn't Asus' fault in particular, but the Plex app for PC, you can see results in this very washed out, ugly, gross picture when I'm in HDR mode on my monitor. Switching over to an Nvidia Shield, on the other hand. For whatever reason, this looks exactly like you'd expect HDR content to look, and it's exactly the same file. Now the good news here is that, aside from the glow around my mute icon here, one moment please. Ah, that's better. Local dimming has its issues. But the good news is that when the stars align and you get HDR content going on this thing, it looks absolutely freaking awesome. I'm really pleased to say that one of my major concerns going from OLED back to an LCD of some sort was that I'd have to deal with the glow. Whenever you're watching letterboxed content on a 16 by 9 display, when you're in a dark room, like it's quite distracting. But I'm very pleased to report that when you have absolutely nothing sitting around, like a mute icon for example, it is pitch black. I couldn't see it even last night with all the lights off and complete darkness outside. Now Windows' poor handling of HDR content is obviously not a new problem, and it's something that I will be able to work around as long as ASUS works with Logitech to get Harmony integration going, because this is not an amazing remote. The good news is the rest of the on-screen display is about what you would expect for a gaming monitor. You can adjust overdrive, you can adjust the speed of the 384 local dimming zones. So like how quickly they try to react to the content that's on the screen. When you're not in HDR mode, you can make adjustments to things like gamma and all that kind of good stuff. But honestly, with how calibrated this thing is out of the box, I actually wouldn't recommend touching it at all. It looks absolutely freaking fantastic. And of course, you can overclock. So if you turn max refresh rate on, you can go from 120 Hertz max to 144 Hertz max. But there's gonna be some limitations. So at 144, you're dealing with chroma subsampling, which if you're using the desktop rather than playing a game can be quite noticeable in like this colored fringing around text. At 120, you are limited to eight bit color. And at 98 Hertz, that's gonna be the best experience when you're at the desktop because you're able to run RGB 10 bit color at well, far greater than the 60 Hertz refresh rate that you'd be stuck with with any other 4K TV. Now let's move on to something that we haven't done yet. Now Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran super smooth. Thank you, G-Sync. Guys, I'm not a competitive gamer. So I'm a huge fan of G-Sync and games like that definitely benefit from the animation smoothness, even if it does come at the cost of a little bit of input delay. But this is a game you don't want any lag on. Oh yes, so smooth. Now, one thing that I did find noticeable from time to time is this weird banding where you can kind of see the borders between the lighting zones is what it looks like. I can only see them vertically though, which is weird. I can't see them horizontally, but it does kind of look like what would be the spacing of the full array local dimming zones. Man, it is so noticeable on a game like this. Oops. How did I get over that? Of course, we couldn't call a BFGD video complete without talking about the mouse and keyboard living room experience. So I mean, it is a challenge that there are aspects of a lot of PC games, particularly mouse and keyboard ones that are not built to be enjoyed from 10 or 15 feet away, but all the usual complaints that you have about gaming on a TV, whether it's input lag or whether it's response time of the pixels or whatever the case may be are basically non-issues here. Wow. Really, cat? So I think I'm ready for the conclusion and it was far from a foregone one. You can see here, my OLED didn't really go very far away. There was a solid chance that this was going right back on the console when we were done here, but it looks like the BFGD is here to stay. It has the obvious advantages of its thousand nit peak brightness in HDR games and movies and two of my major concerns, one being the glow around letterbox content and the other being the glow around bright objects moving across dark backgrounds, kind of like these here, these blue snowflakes moving across this dark chasm and cross code here ended up not being issues. So I'm getting high refresh rate gaming with basically no downside because I happen to be a super techie nerdy person who already has a lot of the downsides taken care of. Like not everybody already has a couch, keyboard, mouse setup that's wired into their home theater console. Not everybody has a gaming PC as part of their living room. Yeah, this whole thing needs a complete rebuild. I guess we'll do a video about it. Make sure you guys are subscribed so you don't miss that. But if you're willing to work around those issues and if ASUS works with Logitech to get harmony integration, I just don't really see a downside here. Pulseway is a real-time remote monitoring and management software that helps you fix problems on the go. You can send commands from any mobile device and the software is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux. Pulseway's single app gives you remote desktop functionality so you can get access to real-time status, system resources. You can see logged in users, you can monitor network performance, you can manage Windows updates and more. In fact, the sky's the limit because you can create and deploy your own custom scripts to automate your IT tasks. So try it for free at pulseway.com or through our link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoyed this video, you can check out where to buy this product at the link in the description. And if you're looking for more content to watch, we did a review of a Sony OLED TV that has the speakers built into the panel. It's pretty freaking cool. We're gonna have that linked as well.