One YEAR Using The Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED - My Thoughts

welcome back to monitor's unboxed I've been using the Alienware aw3423dw for about a year now I published my review back in early April of 2022 and since then it has been my daily driver gaming monitor in today's video I wanted to give my thoughts on using a cutie OLED for a full 12 months how's it been did some of the issues become more or less annoying over time and of course have I experienced any burn-in before diving into the details I'll explain how I've been using the aw3423dw in my studio here I have two main PC setups my workstation which is where I write scripts analyze data and edit videos it's positioned in my test systems and then I've got my gaming PC which is a dedicated setup for playing games over on patreon and float plan I have a studio tour showing these setups if you're interested or just need a bit more context about a year ago I moved away from the single all-purpose PC setup for work and play because the best hardware for each use case is a bit different and that allowed me to pick the best monitor for gaming dues with my gaming PC after reviewing the aw3423dw that's what I picked I really wanted to get into HDR gaming in a more significant way and the DW being an OLED was the perfect choice for that few things to note here about how I've been using this display as it's been my gaming monitor I have primarily been using it for gaming however that's not the only thing I've been doing I'd say it's been about a 70 30 split between gaming and web browsing so 70 of the time gaming 30 of the time browsing the web watching YouTube videos in a split screen mode managing my steam library and so on I also don't have tons of time for gaming across the last year I've tallied up my gaming time and it's been about 350 hours on PC or roughly an hour a day that's on the low side for me as well I've moved house in the last year of built a new studio that you see here which has taken up a lot of my free time point is there will be people out there that have put in a thousand plus hours of screen time into the aw3423dw already quite easily four hours of use a day over 365 days is nearly 1500 hours of use but that's not me at best I reckon I've used it for around 500 hours I also have my gaming PC set up in a way that's optimized for PC OLED use as I would recommend anyone does this means in Windows I'm using dark mode I have the task are minimized and I've set the display to sleep after five minutes of inactivity I haven't been trying to punch my monitor I've been trying to use it in a realistic way but I do have it set to 200 nits for SDR content which is 80 of what the monitor can do best case the the question that everyone once answered I'm sure is have I experienced burning the answer is no but also maybe it's a complicated situation and it's quite hard to describe so let's break down burning on the aw3423 DW practically speaking I have not experienced burning by that I mean when browsing the web playing games watching videos or just using the monitor normally my monitor has no noticeable burning artifacts no navigation bars or icons have burned in whatsoever it's not like I'm playing a game and there's ugly static burn-in masks of the Excel spreadsheets I've been viewing the screen still looks excellent and clear across all use cases however if I look really closely I can start to see the early effects of burning when viewing a full screen mid-gray image I can see an extremely faint vertical line down the exact middle of the screen it's very very difficult to spot and I'm not sure I'll be able to capture it well on camera but basically it's most noticeable when viewing a grayscale RGB value of 50 or so it's practically invisible above RGB 100 and Below RGB 20. when looking at individual colors it's invisible looking at full screen blue almost impossible to spot with red and difficult to see though the most obvious when looking at Green I want to stress here that this is not obvious burn-in I had to go hunting for this specifically when making this video without looking at these test images I never would have noticed like I said during normal usage it's basically impossible to spot this vertical line and it has no real impact on my usability of the monitor with that said it's an interesting and somewhat concerning finding the cause of this faint burning I believe is side by side app usage in Windows for example let's say I'm running Chrome and steam side by side straight down the middle of the screen is a white line which is the outer edge of the apps joined together as it's white it's a brighter element that will wear the pixels more and it's always in the exact same position for example even if I switch to the Steam and chrome sides that white line is still in the same spot while all the other static navigation elements and things have swapped place even if I only had one app opened snapped to one side which I do quite often there's still that white Outer Edge visible in the center of the screen it's one of the most static elements on the screen during these periods of desktop use and even in dark mode it's not dimmed it's bright white it was also interesting to discover this faint burning is more visible viewing a green color than the other colors this suggests the green sub pixel has burned in slightly faster than the other sub pixels but it's hard to draw any strong conclusions here as with my unit it's really not very noticeable it's probably going to take at least another year of usage for any further effects to be seen but what does concern me is that I haven't exactly been viewing heaps of desktop apps on my aw3423dw all up it's probably been only 150 to 200 hours of app usage in that side by side or snap configuration that's a very low total number of hours and I would suspect any sort of serious desktop use for even a few hours a day let's say 600 hours over a year would already be showing this sort of burning perhaps to an even greater degree than I've seen so I'd be interested to hear from other aw3423dw owners in the comments if that's the case and also what sort of burning you're experiencing what's also tricky is that I was an early adopter of this model buying a unit from the first batch which have firmware version m0b101 this firmware revision is dodgy and has plenty of bugs unlike lady units that shipped with m0b102 and there's no way to update it as this display does not support user firmware updates my only option here is to ship the monitor back to Dell and get them to update it which I haven't been willing to do and I think is an unreasonable ask from customers the reason why I bring this up is firmware m0b101 has clear issues running some of the OLED panel maintenance features in particular the pixel refresh and panel refresh these are supposed to activate automatically after certain periods of use for example the pixel refresh should be run after every 4 to 20 hours of use while the panel refresh should be run after 1500 hours according to Dell's manual the monitor should automatically activate these features after use exceeds these thresholds when the monitor goes into standby but that doesn't happen consistently with the initial firmware release often the monitor won't run the pixel refresher or on next use I'll turn it on and it'll come up with a pop-up asking me to run the pixel refresher instead of running it during standby and that can be pretty annoying as when I turn on the monitor I want to use it not wait around for seven minutes while the pixel refresher runs so I'll often just ignore the warning or force it not to run so basically it's hard to know whether my aw3423dw has been run link these maintenance features on the schedule it should be at the very least the implementation is buggy with that said I did run the panel refresh feature manually and it made little to no difference to the burning I described earlier I wouldn't have expected this to activate automatically yet as it's scheduled for every 1500 hours but I run it for science reasons for this video and yet not much of a difference the good news is that my unit is covered by three years of burning warranty at minimum if the early signs of burning I'm seeing here progress to more obvious burning within the next two years I will be eligible for a replacement under warranty if it turns out the burning is caused by buggy firmware not running maintenance features properly that's Dell's fault for not fixing those bugs and not allowing user upgradable firmware would be a harsh lesson for them to learn if it leads to more rmas for burning than expected however at this stage I wouldn't even remotely consider an RMA for burning as it's invisible during at least my regular usage let's move on from burning now as right now for me it is a minor concern what I'm pleased to say is that I've been really enjoying this monitor for HDR gaming it's perhaps even better than I expressed in my review which was I guess already a pretty positive review this kudi OLED panel is truly excellent for gaming and after now playing a wide variety of HDR games on it I'm convinced that high-end monitor buyers should be placing HDR at number one on their desired feature list OLED also should be strongly considered due to its speed and dimming ability but even if you get a full array locally dimmed LCD for HDR I think you'll really be getting a significant upgrade with your monitor if that's something that you're not currently experiencing what has been pleasing to see is that I've been able to confirm excellent levels of brightness across a large number of games it's pretty typical to see around a thousand nits of real world brightness for bright highlights in games that has been the case across most major titles that I've played things like bright lights in Dead Space the sun in The Last of Us Part One candles in Resident Evil 4 all of those elements are bright and look fantastic on this display it's not a case where the QD OLED panel can only hit a thousand it's in synthetic tests I've actually gotten at my measuring tools multiple times and confirmed this sort of brightness in a dozen or more instances even brightness for larger screen areas is pretty good outdoor scenes and large windows can often be around 400 to 500 nits which is very much sufficient to create that bright hdrx while gaming and this has been a huge step up in visual quality from the IPS LCD I was using previously same sort of resolution and size only a small increase to the refresh rate but it's moving from IPS to OLED that has been all the difference much deeper blacks proper HDR experience better motion Clarity it's a huge upgrade in image quality I think any buyer of an OLED gaming monitor will immediately be able to tell the difference between it and their old LCD if that's what they were upgrading from and it's not a subtle difference it's very obvious and at least in my opinion I think it justifies the expense now I did spend some time in my review going over the flaws with the aw3423dw and its Cudi OLED panel so after using it for a year now I thought I'd rank these flaws in terms of their impact over the long term and how annoying I've found them I've got seven issues to rank so let's get started from least annoying to most annoying in seventh spot I've got the input lag as I noted in my review the aw3423dw has a higher processing delay than other monitors in practice this is not something I've noticed not a highly latency sensitive competitive multiplayer gamer so I really don't care about this floor at all similarly in sixth spot I've got the lack of HDMI 2.1 currently I'm only using the display over DisplayPort and don't have any other devices attached so I've got no use for the HDMI ports at all let alone HDMI 2.1 ports maybe in the future I'd attach a console in which case a lack of HDMI 2.1 might be annoying but I don't really see myself doing this so I don't see this being an issue in fifth place I've got the relatively low SDR brightness I rarely use any monitor with SDR brightness set above 200 nits so the aw3423dw being capable of only 240 nits is a non-issue for me however it is slightly more annoying than the other two issues I've mentioned in that if I was to change the location of this monitor to a brighter area I might have required higher brightness realistically this had no impact on my buying decision though I guess I didn't really buy it I bought it for the review but you know what I mean if I was buying this monitor this wouldn't be a consideration in fourth place this is where the minor annoyances begin I've got the fan noise here this is something I can notice and annoys me slightly but doesn't really impact day-to-day usage all that much usually I'm playing games so I can't hear the fan over game audio or even just my PC but it does irritate me that the fan spins up at times for no reason and remains active while the monitor is in standby while browsing the web I can hear it so ideally this would have been fixed as I'm using the monitor primarily for gaming and only the occasional amount of desktop use the non-standard triangle RGB subpix allow is mostly not an issue for my day-to-day usage however it is still something I can notice during the times I'm using this monitor for desktop app usage and it's inferior to the IPS monitors I use daily for productivity work when it comes to text quality so the subpixel layout I have in third place as a minor to moderate annoyance if a successor was released that didn't address this issue I'd probably still be fine with it in second place this is where we get to the moderate and major issues that definitely need to be resolved with the future version of this monitor here I have the lack of use upgradable firmware as I've talked about previously the initial firmware release is buggy and these bugs were fixed in a revision that is currently inaccessible to me as I can't update the monitor things like the maintenance features not activating properly the monitor having difficulty waking up from sleep and some labeling issues in the OSD all do annoy me to a small degree on a daily basis and it's frustrating that I can't easily fix this by applying a firmware update I know exists I think it's crucial for a product at this price point to support user updates it may never be necessary to use this feature but at least if something does come up if there's some unique or rare bug it would be fixable with little hassle the number one issue with the aw3423dw and a consistent source of frustration for me is the screen coding this is definitely something Samsung needs to address with the second generation of QD OLED gaming panels the way this panel both reflects diffuse ambient light and creates mirror-like Reflections really limits its usability in brighter environments so I've had to specifically optimize my gaming setup to reduce Reflections and I end up gaming in dim lighting or a dark room most of the time for example with lights off had this screen used the coding and structure of LG's W OLED panels whether glossy or matte it would have been much more usable in even moderate indoor light which is sometimes my preferred way to game during the day like on a weekend in the middle of the day for example I still don't think this is a total deal breaker but it's the most glaring issue with the panel it just isn't great to have an OLED where deep blacks are a key feature only to have that feature let down by raised blacks in brighter rooms due to coding issues if a future version did solve this problem I'd say that alone would get me to consider an upgrade so those are my thoughts on using the Alienware aw3423dw for the last year I genuinely really like this Monitor and I think it's excellent for HDR gaming and the good news is that many of the issues with it don't affect my use case substantially I will be continuing to recommend Cudi old monitors to higher monitor Shoppers as I think the experience you get is among the best on the market especially for gamers interested in stunning high quality visual experiences using HDR there are a few concerns though such as the very early stages of burning after not a huge amount of hours firmware annoyances that can't be fixed as the monitor doesn't support firmer updates and the number one issue of the screen coding it'll be very interesting to see how burn-in fares over the next year as I continue to use this display primarily for gaming but with a bit of desktop app usage mixed in right now it's a non-issue and doesn't affect my experience at all the burning I've experienced is very very minor and very difficult to notice but it's possible that in a year things will be different even as I continue to use the display as intended for Content consumption and with things like dark mode enabled while I am loving this monitor I also probably wouldn't recommend it right now as there are more qdo-led options on the market these days more than that one option when I bought it I've tested four qdo LEDs so far and you can see my detailed thoughts on which ones are best in my dedicated video but if I was buying one now I'd probably pick the Samsung model instead for my use case nice well I did also buy the older G8 for testing and I do still have it I have no plans on using it for now as part of me is curious about how the aw3423dw will fare after another year of use but it is definitely worth considering if you're thinking of jumping into this monitor ecosystem anyway that's it for this one I talk about my personal gaming knowledge and what it's been like using this particular cutie OLED monitor so I hope all the prospective buys of not just this particular monitor but also other cutie oleds will get a sense of what's been like to use this monitor the sort of the things about burning and so on will hopefully be useful to some of you so yeah if you like this sort of video please do like the video consider subscribing to monitors unbox and also supporting us directly through patreon or float plan uh your support through those places allows us to buy some of these monitors I mean I probably would have bought one of these for myself anyway not using patreon money but you know we've bought things like the old edgy 8 for testing we bought this monitor for testing initially so yeah really appreciate all the support we get from you so thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next one thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Monitors Unboxed

Views: 168,005

Keywords:

Id: bBiXa89QeOc

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Fire_Lord_Cinder]

This is why I’m waiting for mini-led ultra wides. I know that I personally can’t handle burn in. Once I saw it, I would be looking to upgrade.

[u/piggybank21]

If you buy Oled, just be prepared to accept some levels of burn in in a few years. Which for a lot of people on this sub, it will be time to upgrade anyways.

But if you buy one, don't try to convince yourself that you can baby it in a thousand way to avoid it. You will mentally go insane doing that.

Remember, you are the one using the monitor, not the other way around.

[u/Happy295]

MicroLED 42 inch when?

[u/Lmui]

I'm a fairly early adopter.

I got mine May 12th, 2022 and it's been used a lot since. It's my primary work monitor, and I've seen the 1500h refresh 3 times to date.

Most of the time, it's in roughly 150nit SDR. I do use it in HDR some of the time, but it might be a cumulative 100h across the entire time I've had the monitor.

There's 2 places I have burn-in.

1. Taskbar - I don't auto-hide my work taskbar, so the taskbar has burned in.
2. My work is heavily browser based, so the bookmarks bar -> webpage transition area is burned in.

It's definitely not noticeable in regular use, I had to go looking for it, but it's worth keeping an eye on since I've got another two years to use the burn-in warranty.

[u/Kompira]

It would've been useful to see how much brightness has been lost if they measured it. I've seen posts claiming a lot of brightness loss. My LG CX lost about 40% in 6000h. I've been using it with TPC disabled, but It runs only at 80 nits.

[u/Thwitch]

I've been using one for software development and gaming ~6hr every day with static windows for 8 months and have yet to notice any burn in myself if that means anything.

My only two big issues are 1) that It wont display the full OSD without an active input, so I can't run pixel or panel refresh without my computer being on and awake and 2) that sometimes when Im waiting for an input to switch, say sleeping my desktop and waking my laptop, the monitor will freeze in its eco state, and I will have to completely pull the plug to get it to wake back up

[u/anthrazithe]

Tl;dr?

[u/Rincewend]

What a great YT channel! I always enjoy Tim's analysis. I went with the Neo G7 that Tim liked fairly well and kept it for about four months. I found the HDR and overall PQ to be excellent but there was some firmware jank that finally irritated me to the point that I sold it and bought a C2 on sale. I will use it for a few years until either something much better for HDR comes along or I burn the screen.

I enjoy the HDR experience so much that I'm willing to put up with burn in mitigation and risk until there is something better available.

[u/eaglearcade]

Even with pixel shifting technology, burn-in can and will still happen. I remember they used pixel shifting technology in latter model Plasmas, stating it would never have burn in again. 3 years later, I could see the Weather Channel logo on various scenes of movies.