- GIGABYTE AORUS sponsored this video. And while I've been a huge fan of gaming on ultrawide monitors ever since their debut
around seven years ago, today, they have a bit of
a problem and that's price. Compared to the F048U or
other large format OLEDs, ultrawides tend to be priced
as though they still have the parts of the display
that have kind of been sliced off to narrow the field of view. Now, this does contribute to
a more cinematic experience, but it was actually
Wendell from "Level1Techs" that initially made the argument to me. He goes, "Linus, why are you paying extra for a sliced off monitor, when you could just have a bigger one and put the black bars on
it for that cinematic view?" Now, if we were talking about conventional monitor
technology, I would say, "Look, I don't want two glowing
black bars shining at me while I'm trying to experience
my game or my movie, but with OLED, you can
turn those pixels off. So, why settle? Why not have cinematic
ultrawide when you want it and full, gigantic 16:9 when you want to get some work done? Let's take a look at the F048U and find out if I am
going to be abandoning ultrawide once and for all.
(thuds) (theme music) (chuckles) I actually can't figure
out how this box opens. It has the normal conventional
monitor opening things here, but then, it has more TV style ones here. Let's try doing it the monitor way. Now, GIGABYTE AORUS
did sponsor this video, which entitles them to a couple of key product talking points. But before we even get to those, we gotta acknowledge the
elephant in the room. There is only one manufacturer of 48" OLED panels right now, LG Display. So, that means any price premium, GIGABYTE AORUS demands for the F048U, will have to be justified whether it's by the accessory package or by the gaming and
monitor centric features that they've built into the display. That uphill battle begins
with an accessory package that is more interesting than
it at first appears to be, starting with the remote. Unlike an LG smart TV,
you're not gonna have a built-in Netflix app
or anything like that. But what you will have hopefully, is more gaming centric features in a more conventional monitor OSD. The next thing we find
here, a DisplayPort cable. That's right. No TV on the market that I'm aware of, supports DisplayPort 1.4. Now, whether we're actually
able to leverage that to run at 144 Hz 4k with overclocking, it remains to be seen. But a girl can dream, right? An HD ultra high speed cable
for the included HDMI 2.1 port. You could use that for your
game console for example. There's a USB 3.0 cable, so
it'll have a built-in hub like you would expect from a monitor, power cord and this product warranty card. Now, while the C10 and the C1 can be used
as desktop displays, there are a few sort of quirks. That begins with the
stand, which on the C1 48" is a long wide foot that makes it difficult to run cables
under your monitor. With that said, I'm
not a huge fan of these sort of widespread little feet either. Well, thankfully, both
of them have VESA mount on the back, so you
can ultimately put them on whatever stand you'd like. The bigger issue though, is that on the TV version of this panel, not all of the input modes
are optimized for gaming. And more importantly, the brightness will
automatically modulate. That is to say it will dim
when it detects a static image. This is to help reduce the
chance of the pixels wearing out or becoming burned in. Now, you can alleviate
this and most of the issues with using an LG OLED
as a desktop display, but in doing so, you could end up actually voiding your warranty by changing unauthorized
settings in the service menu. That is why I held up the warranty card. And that is where this monitor
might end up standing out for people who really want to use an OLED as a large format desktop display. Of course, some of the other benefits aren't very well laid
out on the product page and I don't even know
if there are benefits. For example, there's a
USB Type-C port here. What does it do? I have no idea. There's a 3.5 mm input,
as well the headphone jack that presumably will
carry the audio stream from your HDMI 2.1 or
DisplayPort 1.4 input. And, ah, this is a key benefit. Navigation can be done with the nipple on the bottom of the display, rather than using the remote
if you want to, which is nice. I actually am using a C10 48" at work right now and having to have the remote on my desk, does add unnecessary clutter. Oh, shoot. I gotta move
my old monitor. (scoffs) By the way, if you're
confused as to why I ended up with the LG UltraGear on my desk after the ASUS version kind of won the shootout that I was doing, it came down to the lower
pixel response times on this particular model, which is what makes this AORUS display such a contender for my desk because OLED inherently has much, much lower pixel response times than, we'll really any LCD-based technology. One small challenge is going
to be my streaming stuff and the cable management holes that I drilled in my desk though. That purple cast, when it's off, you can really tell it's an LG OLED, hey. So the bad news is you're paying a lot more than for the LG version, but the good news is, you know that it's an
absolutely kick-ass pound. You're just paying extra for warranty, the DisplayPort port. Oh! Actually, and the integrated soundbar. I haven't tried this yet,
but obviously, being a TV, the C10 and the C1 do not
have great integrated sound because they have no
visible speaker grills. Hopefully, this is a little better. I already have a USB... (gasps) Oh my, shoot, my pre-run
cables don't reach. Now, it seems like as good a
time as any to get in some of GIGABYTE AORUS' talking points here. Let me change my desktop wallpaper. This is a little awkward. (laughing) Oh, this is hilarious. I already mentioned
everything organically, except it support for
10-bit color, obviously. And it's 98% coverage of
the DCIP3 color space. Now, something that's not well understood about this monitor is
it's HDR capabilities. It does say on the product page, it supports both HDR-10 and HLG. Now, I've already noticed, when bringing up large
full screen white content, I am seeing some dimming of the display. You guys noticed that? Can you see how bright that is? And then if I go full screen, you can see it's a little dimmer. But what I also noticed is
it seems to be a bit faster in terms of that responsiveness. Whether you prefer that or
not is entirely up to you, but let's see what we can
do to tune it in the menu. So we're in SDR, vivid. Really? My options are
custom 1 custom 2 and green? Oh, green like... (laughing) Green like power saving. I thought you meant
green, like a green tint. (Andy laughing)
That's very... GIGABYTE, I'd like you to change that. Call it eco or something please. Oh, oh, there's a whole bunch more, reader, movie, RTS, RPG,
FPS, arcade, standard. That's weird. Okay. Burn this image into
your mind, pun intended. Is green brighter than vivid? - [Andy] No way. - It is. - [Andy] No way, that doesn't
really make any sense. - But it is!
(Andy laughing) - Type-C, DSC. I think that's Display Stream Compression. I think it has a Type-C display (chuckles) input, Andy. - [Andy] Wow. That's nice. - I'm gonna go get my laptop and find out. Man, imagine it has USB Power Delivery and charges of the laptop, (keyboard clacks)
and just has that completely not dock... It totally does. It has Power Delivery. It charges the laptop.
(keyboard clacks) Since we're poking around
in the AMD control panel, the reported FreeSync
refresh rate is 48 to 120 Hz, So as long as you don't get
below 48 fps in your game, you shouldn't experience
any stutter or tearing. After fiddling with it, I wish I had a more complete
answer for you, guys, but I do at least have some information. It supports Power Delivery, but with a very limited amount of power, so you'll probably have to
plug in your laptop separately and over the Type-C port, it
does accept a display input. But so far, I've only managed to go as far
as 4k 60 Hz or 1440p 120 Hz. It's hard to say whether
that's limitation on my laptop or the display at this point. And I don't have any
alternatives here with me. Oh, cool! It has a built-in KVM switch. So that's a function of the
built-in USB hub, I guess. Of course the Type-C and the Type-B can be your alternate computers. (finger snaps) Frickin' sick. And then, you plug your mouse and keyboard into the USB A ports. I don't actually need
that function personally, but if you frequently use two
computers, say for example, you're a developer, that
would be super handy. Audio mode out, 600R. I have
no idea what I just did. What is 600R? Okay, we're back on the Type-C input. Okay, we're back. 600R is a setting that allows you to tune the audio output for high
impedance headphones. It also caused my display board input to immediately cease
functioning. (chuckles) Actually, wait, Andy, this is interesting. I'm only getting 4k 60 Hz here as well. I wonder if there's another DisplayPort setting I didn't see before. The good news is that 4k
120 Hz works just fine. The bad news is that
this Thunderbolt 3 Dock that I use actually only
supports DisplayPort 1.2. So that means, 4K 60 Hz, unless I want to drag the DisplayPort cable
through the wall right now. Okay, I'm plugging in the new cable. What is this doing back here? Look at this cute Linus
plushy, lttstore.com. It's not exactly ideal, but this is the longest
DisplayPort cable I have. I'm gonna have to fix the
cable management later, but I should be able to
send it to 4k 120 Hz now. (cheering) I do notice a little bit of a
green tinge when I'm off-axis, so when I'm looking into the corners, just because the display is so large, so I would recommend having
a solid 18 to maybe even 24" between you and the display, if you do plan to use
it as a desktop display. It's hard to really gauge performance without all of our gear and a 48" TV to put right beside it. But what I will say about the HDR content consumption experience is that compared to GIGABYTE AORUS' specs, this is a lot better than I expected. Of course not everything's HDR. Let's change gears and focus on gaming. I'll start with one of my
all-time favorite games, which happens to benefit from
as much screen real estate as you can possibly throw at it, "Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance". So one of the coolest
things about this game is these strategic zoom. You don't have a mini map. You just use your mouse
wheel to see the whole map. And I'm being bombed. I
did not build lay fighters. Well, I did say I wanted this
to be a quick one, didn't I? - [Andy] Mm-hmm. - Yep, that was it. That's the GG. Either way, is this a great gaming experience? Uh, freakin' yeah, a little bit. Now let's change gears and talk
about how we can set this up for the more cinematic
black bar experience. Instead of having the scaling
performed on our display, we're gonna have it performed on our GPU and we're gonna change our
scaling mode to aspect ratio. You can also change it to no scaling. And then you'll just have kind of however many pixels you specify sized display in the middle. Like for example, the 3840 x
1800 resolution that I made, that's gonna give me some
kinda cinematic black bars, but it's going to allow me to continue to utilize the full horizontal
resolution of my display. So let's go ahead and
fire up "DOOM Eternal". And there you have it, cinematic, ultrawide gaming experience
on a regular 16 x 9 monitor, TV, whatever, whatever this thing is. The one thing you can't do
is make it curved obviously. And that's something
that can be an advantage on a display of this size, which leaves us one more
major thing to uncover. Can it support 144 Hz with overclocking? That would be an advantage over a TV. So far, it's not looking good. Sometimes, monitors will have a setting that allows them to enable overclocking. I don't see anything
like that in here though, so all that's left is to
try this one more time and see if it clicks. Okay, we're going to the settings menu. It thinks it's at 4k 144
Hz, it's actually at 120 Hz, so the scaler might think
it can take 144 Hz input, but the actual panel does not
seem to be running at 144. I thought maybe ARS figured out some kinda super cool way
to get it to run at 144. The reality of it is it's
not a huge difference between 120 and 144 in
terms of the perception, but I mean, hey, every little bit counts. Last thing's left. - [Narrator] You can't take a step forward without a leap of faith. - Yeah, the built-in speakers are... They're okay. They're bigger and they
fire directly at you, which is an advantage, but they're still monitor speakers and you're still gonna
need a nice pair of cans. And that's it. Whether or not you need
a monitor like this, well, that's up to you, but I can tell you that the experience of using a large format display like this as a gaming monitor,
un-freaking-believable. And I will not be swapping
this out for my ultrawide. This is coming with me to the new house and my new gaming setup, but I'll probably get
like a VESA mount for it. So it comes off the back of the desk and have a nice clean set up.
Happens at 11:20.
Does he play on the FAF client.