dave james likes being tall
This month I mainly played the following games: shadow of doubt. This month, a shadow sneaked into my machine and pulled me in with gumshoe antics. And as scary as it sounds to me, every time I get beaten to death by an angry pseudo-cop, I keep coming back.
This month we mainly tested: Graphics cards, SSDs, and new CPUs. And we can probably stop getting excited about PCIe 5.0 SSDs. (opens in new tab)
I wish the gaming monitor was a little taller. I wish the lag was smaller. I wish it had a shiny, fast OLED and a 6ft HDMI 2.1 cable. Yes, I’m paraphrasing Skee-Lo bitterly. And I know it’s a reference flying over the heads of most people reading this. But I’m beyond petty desires for cultural relevance.
We’ve been covering and coveting a variety of OLED gaming monitors lately, but they’re the nirvana of displays that can come as close, if not perfect screens, as making the odds. We’re getting close to a state. Anyway, at least for a while.
We checked out the big boys, such as the giant 48-inch gigabyte they offer each year. (opens in new tab) Similar size BenQ (opens in new tab)also folded the curvy Corsair Flex (opens in new tab)I mean, it’s far from the perfect monitor, but OLED comes in many flavors.Our favorite remains the Alienware 34″ (opens in new tab) Optional or similar ultra-wide Evnia from Philips (opens in new tab) That beautiful glossy coating.
But there are itches that none of them bother me. It’s an itch that stems from the impressive array of gaming laptops I’ve played with over the past few months.
16:10 has gone AWOL from a gaming monitor, but is creeping into my laptop life.
Since the joint launch of Intel and Nvidia’s next-generation mobile parts, a number of refreshed and brand-new machines have passed through the lab. And no matter how you feel about those sheer costs and form factor limitations that hold back the most powerful GPUs, (opens in new tab)some of these notebooks presented the best laptop screens I’ve ever seen.
And while Mini LED panels were great in their own right when used with laptops, we’ve seen enough of Mini LED gaming monitors. (opens in new tab) To know that’s not what I want on my desktop.
No, what I really want to replace from these gaming laptops is the stunning 16:10 aspect ratio. 16:10 has gone from gaming monitor to AWOL but creeping into laptop life.
Gaming on a recent Asus Zephyrus M16 2560 x 1600 panel (opens in new tab) and Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (opens in new tab) I fell in love again because the 16:10 screen has more pixels than the traditional 16:9.
I mean, we say traditional, but that widescreen aspect ratio is quite untraditional in PC gaming terms, and is actually a fairly recent phenomenon…relatively speaking. For a long time, the pinnacle of gaming monitors was the old 30-inch Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP with a native resolution of 2560 x 1600. What a screen.
However, productivity-focused laptops are increasingly switching to higher resolutions such as the Dell XPS and Framework notebooks. (opens in new tab)and more recently, there’s been a shift in gaming laptops, even Steam Deck (opens in new tab) And the new AOKZOE A1 Pro (opens in new tab) handheld.
No gaming monitor yet. There isn’t a single screen with a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz that you can buy with a 16:10 aspect ratio. And I’m a terrible trolop for his 144Hz+ display, so I need a high refresh rate. Sure, 16:9 is what cinematic experiences are all about, but Give me more screens, make me snappy.
I’m certainly partial to the ultra-cinematic 21:9 ratio in ultrawide format, but I still appreciate a little extra pixel height in front of it. Do you have?
The extra height is great for productivity and thrashing on your Windows desktop, but it also looks great in games. Has anyone ever experienced that with an ultrawide gaming monitor you might see a weird series of black bars in your cutscenes but the extra screen real estate makes the game of your choice look wider in his world You get a field of view. Great for first person shooters and really fun for third person games.
But outside of a few stunning gaming laptop screens, desktop gaming monitors aren’t likely to get the same treatment. Simply, it’s been a niche for panels for so long, and it’s financially ill-advised to force manufacturers to cut panel sheets differently when they’re mostly cutting to the TV’s dominant 16:9 ratio. This is because it is a difficult requirement for
So it’s a dream come true that it stays on the desktop. Small tall displays should stick to mobile gaming.
