2 Monitors, different resolution

[Halfdan]

I have a Asus XG279q as Mainmonitor for gaming etc and was looking for a sidemonitor. 

 

So my Main is 175Hz IPS 1440p 27" and i wanted the secondary also to have 27".

I use my secondarymonitor for:

 

watching Videos/Youtube while gaming

webbrowsing

some coding

 

I orderd a ASUS PA278QV 27" Pro Art for 360€ and now stumbled over a good discount. I could get a Dell UltraSharp 27"  U2720Q. But this one is 4k for 540€ and Dell list it for 846€. Now i'm not sure which one to pick, specially because of the different Resolutions to my Mainmonitor on the second One.

 

Or would you pick a totally different Monitor in this Case? 

[Stahlmann]

If possible, i'd get the same monitor as the main one just for my OCD. But on the other hand, technically there won't be a problem if you use another resolution or size on the 2nd monitor.

[minibois]

7 minutes ago, Halfdan said:

So my Main is 175Hz IPS 1440p 27" and i wanted the secondary also to have 27".

 

I orderd a ASUS PA278QV 27" Pro Art for 360€ and now stumbled over a good discount. I could get a Dell UltraSharp 27"  U2720Q. But this one is 4k for 540€ and Dell list it for 846€. Now i'm not sure which one to pick, specially because of the different Resolutions to my Mainmonitor on the second One.

The main disadvantage to getting a second monitor that is the same physical size, but a different resolution compared to your current monitor is that Windows will not see the physical size.

It will merely see you have a monitor that is 1440 pixels tall and another that is 2160 pixels tall,  when mousing from one monitor to another, you can only do so in the 1440 pixels that are aligned between the two monitors (whether that is the top/bottom/middle 1440 pixels of the 4K monitor you can set yourself).

 

Personally I have three monitors, where the middle one is 4K and the other 1080p, so I can only pass from the middle 4K monitor to one of the others in a specific place of the 4K monitor, but after a while it didn't bother me anymore. But of course that is only the account of one person in this position, others are free to feel different about it.

 

Anyways, I also have a 27" 4K monitor and have been very happy with it for a long time, I only occasionally run into an issue where something is too small on the monitor, but that is few and far between.

The only thing that sometimes bother me and causes me to have to zoom in/out of a webpage occasionally is something that might be exclusive to Chrome (haven't tried it on other browsers).

Chrome remembers what zoom level you have chosen on a per website basis. For example: I only watch YouTube on my secondary 1080p monitor, where I have set the website to 80% zoom level. Now when I open YouTube on my main 4K monitor, it is also at 80%; which is way too small (I would say 150% zoom level is normal on 4K 27", with 100% Windows scaling). Now when I zoom in YouTube on my main 4k monitor, it also zooms in on the secondary 1080p monitor.

 

But again, this is something most people won't bother.