Alienware QD-OLED AW3423DWF Settings Guide - HDR and SDR

what's up everyone it's been a while since we've spoken about OLED monitors here in fact it's been a while since we've done any videos and really there's only one reason I went ahead and swapped my Odyssey G7 for the Alienware aw3423dwf for the past couple of months I have been gaming incessantly without stop completely given up on doing any YouTube videos simply because wherever I had any free time I was using it on playing games on this monitor that's how brilliant it is but without further Ado we're gonna head straight into the best settings that you need to apply to this monitor if you've already bought him right then so for the aw3423dwf the place you want to start for your best settings is this community guide set up by this Ultra wide Master race Community focusing on this monitor in its settings we're gonna go through these one by one and I'm going to take you through all of these and just talk through some of the settings here I don't agree with everything in in here and I've made some changes that I'll explain why and then you can use whichever setting you think is best for your particular needs first thing you want to do is make sure you've got Windows 11. a lot of these settings work back better on on Windows 11. second thing is to make sure you've got the latest firmware downloaded when you download this file it will come with a simple PDF explaining how to do the updates so just follow that get it done second thing you want to do is you want to download the Dell display Manager application basically this allows you to access the monitors settings without having to interact with the external menu interaction button this makes life a lot easier then the next thing you need is the windows HDR calibration app we're going to use this just to do some HDR calibration make sure you've got that downloaded okay so now moving into the settings themselves so we've got the Nvidia control panel here firstly we're just going to head over to adjust desktop color settings here and we're going to ensure we've got brightness controls at 50 gamma at one and that's it we then switch to the video color settings here we want to make sure that we've got this option selected with Nvidia settings don't touch color don't touch gamma go to Advanced and make sure you've got full selected and click apply and that's it for the Nvidia control panel moving on from there we'll go into the windows 11's HDR settings I haven't got HDR turned on therefore you're not able to see HDR here but as soon as you turn hdr on your monitor you'll see some very simple settings here you want to make sure you follow this just simply turn HDR video streaming on hdr on auto hdr on and then you can play about with the SDR contrast content brightness as well this one's quite useful the settings here because when you turn hdr on you can no longer change the brightness of your monitor so at the moment the slider is showing but when you have HDR turned on this slider will be grayed out and that's standard for when you're using HDR the only way you can change that brightness is in Windows in this SDR content brightness slider here his recommendation is 35 my recommendation is 20 I like lower brightness on my monitor okay moving on to the display manager now I think we want to make sure that our contrast is set to 67 you can play about with the settings I have experimented with this and it really does make performance better in HDR mode outside of HDR you can change that to wherever you want in terms of your preference I just stick with 67 across all aspects it works for me okay then you want to go into this color Tab and here you can now set a manual mode or an automatic mode what this guy is asking us to do is to stick with display HDR which I can demonstrate in a different option here because I haven't got HDR turned on it's not showing it in that color tab but these are the different HDR modes we've got desktop Movie game Custom color display and HDR Peak 1000 what this guy is going to suggest to do here if you follow that is to have display HDR selected for desktop and then HDR Peak 1000 selected for any game you play I disagree with this in HDR Peak 1000 mode there is over brightness the brightness is not accurate so in my humble opinion stick with display HDR mode for any time I'm using HDR that's it okay then moving on to the windows HDR calibration this one is very simple to follow again it's because I don't have HDR turned on currently you won't see this and I can't actually show this but it's very simple open the the application click the get started button here and follow these settings and then you just have to save that HDR calibrated profile at the end of those four steps you then go into Windows color management which is just to make sure that this setting is selected use my settings for this device and then in the ICC profiles you want to make sure that your latest calibrated HDR profile is selected just bear in mind again here it's not showing the HDR version or the HDR option because I have HDR turned off but when you turn it on you'll see those options you just want to make sure you follow them I'm just going to quickly cover some of the other things that are available in the Dell display manager that you could play about with as I say brightness if it's HDR you can't change it you'll have to do it in the SDR brightness within windows but other than that this is your preference during the day I'm sort of ranging between 50 to 70 percent I never go all the way to 100 percent within a input source the only thing that I find useful is some hotkeys for switching between input sources I don't have multiple sources so I don't use this but this could be very useful for you in the color tab we've already covered the automation where you can set it to manual or Auto and have different applications automatically switch between different modes depending on when you open them the point here is that if you have HDR turned off you will not see the HDR options you'll see the standard fpsrts or whatever other presets you've got set up when you turn hdr on you'll then see the five or six HDR modes so that's the only thing you need to know here and then you can set it up as you want accordingly dark stabilizer is very very useful I use level 1 for my FPS Competitive Gaming and here you can then turn hdr on as well as I say I always have this selected display HDR and that's it okay so we're gonna just go through any remaining settings in the actual external menu interface so it's quite nice when you turn it on you get the sort of status there in terms of which preset modes you're in which whether your HDR is on your panel's health your dark stabilizer and then you can navigate between some hotkeys if you want to call them or you can just go up and go straight into the main menu now hey we're in the main menu I'm just going to quickly turn the transparency up for this so that you can see this better hopefully that's a bit better yeah that looks a bit good but I'm just going to bring you in and we go going through a top down from this first tab called game there's the preset modes you can switch between standard FPS there's a bunch of things there um these options will not be available if you've got an HDR on they're not the HDR preset modes so they won't be able to this will be grayed out or if you try to select it it'll give you a message that you can't select these when you're in HDR mode when you've got HDR off really the only time I've got I'm choosing between these is when I'm playing Warzone 2 for Competitive Gaming because then I'll go into FPS mode and I'll have to turn HDR off when I've got that on for FPS mode I'll make sure my dark stabilizer is on at one and that's it none of the other settings matter you can change the brightness to to your liking contrast we've already said has to be at 67. so for for Competitive Gaming that's my recommended settings does the job you could go higher on the dock stabilizer and as you can see it really changes the darkness uh or how dark the dark bits are but it really reduces the visual quality of the game I find one does the job for whenever um I want to go really low light in my room I have to turn display HDR or HDR off because you can't go below a certain threshold brightness then I'll go standard and make sure my dark stabilizer is off and then I can change my brightness down to as low as I want so those are the two or three modes that I'm shifting between after experimenting with most of them that's what I find does the job for me for most scenarios okay now going through the rest of these settings we've got the console mode was recommended to be turned on in the Reddit guide that I have shared here previously this being on would help with um some games appearing really washed out in HDR sometimes however some redditors are now reporting that since the new version 3 firmware this is no longer needed and I can concur that I haven't had any issues with grayed out sort of washed out images since the new firmware update so I keep console mode off it's basically to do with the Soul Stone mapping and changing some settings for better compatibility with Xbox and PS5 so it doesn't do anything for me therefore I'm turning it up now we've got alien Vision it allows you to have some strange things that that I don't really use ever in game I mean Crosshair it's just too too big I've never used that for for Competitive Gaming you can go into chroma you can go into clear you can have a night mode I've not really ever used them I think it's a bit of a gimmick but knock yourself out if uh if you need it then we've got the lighting which you can configure into a bunch of different colors for me it's behind the monitor I can't see it so I keep it off all the time just to save energy very beautiful don't get me wrong but I can't see them so it's no point um they don't even shine onto my wall so I just don't see the point of having them on then yeah you can have your aspect ratio change I don't know why you'd want to change your way from 21 by nine but you've got the options there um you can switch between RGB and ycbc art I keep to to RGB because that's better for most use cases ycbcr has some uh some new systems in productivity but the options there the sharpness I don't change for higher Clarity in in game like uh in Warzone 2 I'll just use the Nvidia filter I won't change that and then we've got the smart HDR that's just HDR basically and you can choose between all those HDR options I would recommend to stick with display HDR through black as previously stated for more details on what those modes do and why you should stick with the hdr2 black have a look at Hardware unboxed detail review then you've got the picture in picture modes here you can change the audio go to menu settings you can personalize the shortcut keys and then got display info giving you the model number Etc and these are the the settings for the the panel maintenance these will give you yeah you can turn it all off but that's highly not recommended you should let that work and every time it tells you or prompts you to do this pixel refresh let it do it but you can tell it to postpone it until you go into standard standby mode the next time so if you're in game you can just quickly select the option to do it in standby mode next time the monitor goes into it firmware service tag and then self diagnostic which allows you to flick through all the different colors just to see if there's any issues with any dead pixels or any uh ghosting or or burning appearing as you can see my paddle here is absolutely perfect so far no issues at all which is expected because it's only two months old and that's it that covers all the settings

Channel: Double Take Tech

Views: 74,811

Keywords: alienware, qd-oled, oled, best gaming monitor, gaming settings, best oled gaming monitor, best oled tv 2022, HDR, HDR gaming, Ultrawide

Id: 3SDvCZJZCJw

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023