Up grading monitor

[cavmedic]

Have a Asus tuf 1080p 165hz using hdmi display right now.  Will going to a 4k 60hz with displayport  be a big improvement.

[An0maly_76]

Depends. 60hz is not ideal for advanced gaming, especially if you record gameplay. 165hz is much better suited to advanced gaming.

 

Ask me how I know. I just spent $2700ish on a 5900X / RTX3060ti build because I thought my previous 1700 CPU and GTX1650S GPU were the reason I was having issues recording gameplay. Turns out the 60hz display I have is more likely the reason, and while I don't regret the new build, I think I could have done better with a 3800X / 3900X / 5600X / 5700X / 5800X and an RTX3080ti for the same money, and I honestly think the 1700 and GTX1650S would have been fine for my purposes with a 144-165hz monitor.

[Stahlmann]

Imo, as soon as gaming is in the equasion, something around 144Hz becomes a minimum requirement. For that reason i'd suggest to go with a 1440p 144Hz monitor over a 4K 60Hz one if you really want to upgrade to something higher resolution. If you have us a budget we could give some firm recommendations.

[Andrewtst]

That is not a big improvement to me actually, it sound more than downgrade. 1st you need to make sure your GPU is powerful enough to handle 4K gaming, else you will getting a very low fps. 2nd from 144hz to 60hz is big downgrade for gaming.

 

If you go for 144hz 4K then that is another talk and this will be a big improvement as long your GPU can handle it.

[e22big]

Actually I'll say, yes, you will see some improvement. By the fact that you are either going from 24 to 27/32 inches alone - or you're going from 1080p to 4k at the same 27 inch, that will also show some very significant upgrade. 

 

In a certain kind of game, it could be worth it, not in competitive title for sure though. 

[Montana One-Six]

Visually it will be an improvement, especially overall picture clarity and details. But I would at least want 120Hz. Depending on the budget I would go for 4k 144Hz or 1440p 144Hz rather than 4k 60Hz.

[TudorF]

On 5/14/2022 at 1:38 AM, cavmedic said:

Have a Asus tuf 1080p 165hz using hdmi display right now.  Will going to a 4k 60hz with displayport  be a big improvement.

4K will make fonts and everything that is generated as a vector in a page (lines, shapes) look very crisp.

More pixel density will also make content display in a more condensed way. So if you previously looked at a 1920px per 1080px image it filled the whole screen. Now it will only fill up 1/4th of your screen. So you will have to scale up fonts in your OS, otherwise text will look very small.

But, on the other hand, when you'll be watching images or videos of high resolution (4K and above), you will see incredible detail.

 

60Hz will be just the standard baseline frequency and with a 4K monitor it will be a slower gaming experience. Especially since your video card will work harder to render 4 times more pixels, but at lower refresh rate. It should be playable, though, just not as fast-as-lightning as before.

 

As someone who moved from a HD 24" monitor to a QHD 32" monitor and now to a 4K 32" monitor, I can say that for me resolution and refresh rate are not the most important thing. Gaming is not very important to me, though, I play only casually. Monitor size and colour accuracy are by far the biggest improvements. Bigger monitor gives you a lot more space for multitasking and good colour accuracy make that 4K content look amazing.

 

There are lots of cheap 4K panels with terrible colours, I returned one before I got my latest. 4K is just not that worth it when colour accuracy is crappy.

I'd focus on these, personally:

- size / diagonal

- colour reproduction, sRGB spectrum coverage ( at least 99%)

- brightness

- panel uniformity

- IPS with good viewing angles - this isn't just a gimmick, it's very important for image consistency, otherwise you'll only see the correct image from one single centre point

 

Refresh rates are not that important, though higher ones will make the image have better persistence and reduce motion artefacts. Which helps in gaming, ofc. But that's not much if the other specs are just bad.

You get what you pay for, very rarely you can find cheaper monitors that excel at something. Unfortunaly, for higher quality you have to fork out more. Decent 4K monitors start at between 450-500 bucks for larger ones. Smaller ones can be had for somewhat less but it's not worth getting a 4K monitor at below 32", imo. Even 32" looks a bit condensed at 4K, probably something close to 40" would be optimal to avoid having to rescale stuff.

[cmndr]

What is the use case?

 

I'm currently using a 4K display at 60Hz (does 120Hz with compression, but usually too lazy to enable it - I mostly play RTSes). I have a 3440x1440 100Hz display next to it that I haven't plugged in in 9 months.

 

FPS gaming -> there's a benefit to higher refresh rates.
Most other use cases... ehh depends on size, color quality, etc.

Know your use case.