Fancy taking the plunge to something beyond HD? We look at the ASUS PB278Q, and also the performance hit you'll take with 2560x1440 pixels.


http://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/artic...161224218l.jpg


Continue Reading

Very nice monitor looks well worth the money if you need the pure real estate it gives

I agree about the triple screens in gaming. In FPS games the side screens are pretty useless. Certain games however, like Assassins Creed I do find the side screens used a little more.
I get what you mean in things like Dirt3 when there's just too much going on at the sides but I do kind of feel that adds to the immersiveness of the game. Obviously if it puts you off, it's not a good thing, but I do think it just makes everything more realistic.

Aside from that though, I do find three screens a lot better to work on in windows, whether it's just word or general use like internet/music etc... and obviously video editing spread out across 3 screens has its benefits.

I probably agree that if you're just gaming, you'd be better off getting one of these over 3x 1080 screens - but there's such a price difference between it, I find it hard to justify the cost. I mean, you can get 3x 23inch Dell IPS screens for around £70 cheaper than one of these. It's obviously going to depend on the user at the end of the day - but at the present moment in time, until these come down in price, I think I'd still choose far cheaper 1080 screens.

Well no wonder this panel is so good it's a PLS panel which if I read things correctly is Samsung's answer to LG's IPS technology so that's probably why everything looks so lush it's not just an N panel.

ohh man, finally a reason to update my Asus EAH6970 2GB vid card

Thanks Tom about opening my eyes to club3d cards. been doing some reading and research and their cards are badass

Looking to get the 7990 or the 7970 royalace ghz edition

Nice.

Thanks for your review Tom!

I have a quick question for you and the community:

I was a bit worried when you said cards that are paired in SLi / XFire do not share memory between the cards.

I have recently bought *two* Dell U2412Ms (1920x1600) to run as dual screens running side by side.

To power the screens I was planning on using *two* NVIDIA 660Tis in SLi. In my mind, because *one* U2412M monitor is being plugged into *one* 660Ti card, then in this case the full 4GB of VRAM should be used?

Would I be correct in this assumption? If not, then would you suggest getting one high end graphics card (670/7970/680)?


Many thanks,

np.

I've been thinking about getting one of these for a while. Now that it got a OC3D gold award I think i'll pick one up in the coming weeks, my Acer S243HL looks awesome but it's a TN panel and I think the PB278Q would be a very nice upgrade with its better panel and the extra resolution, especially when I'll have to do a lot of CAD work for university next year.
Until the next generation of cpus and gpus comes out and I upgrade my rig, I'll have to turn the settings in BF3 down so that my 6970 can cope with the 2560x1440 res.

You can't game on 2 screens anyways, so you won't need much v-ram, as far as I know you'll always have only the memory of one card regardless where you plug the screens in

I most say, the best part of the video was whit you sister in it

- Thanks to give me a big smil on the face !

The info for how ever many screens you have (makes no difference) is loaded into both cards and in games it basicaly alternates what card is rendering each frame, so frame 1,3,5,7,9 ect are on card 1 and frames 2,4,6,8 ect are rendered on card 2...

or if you have 3 cards its #1 = 1,4,7 #2 = 2,5,8 #3 = 3,5,9 ect

Not all games handle multiple cards very well so overall performance is pretty much never over 90% extra per card added and after 2 cards the average performance gain per card drops dramatically.

I have this and it's great! It looks much nicer in real life than it does in pictures, by which I mean the plastic used and that sort of thing. The picture quality and colors are amazing too and as an average gamer I feel the response time is good enough for me. Definitely recommend this to anyone. Although Tom is correct - do get a really beefy card before this.

Sorry this is more a question i have a gtx 680 2gb could it be fit to run it for a gaming and max setting

thats a pretty nice monitor but the price is a little high

if i have the money i buy this beast

My question might be weird, but about a valid issue i experienced with another screen ...

... do the 3,5 mm jacks deactivate if you turn off the screen?

i have no idea but i think not becouse is just a pass throu

So you say, a jack signal should not turn off, when i turn off the screen since it doesn't draw power from it, like a USB hub would? Makes absolute sense, then i guess i just had a weird monitor in the past!

xD.. unless u can adjust the volume in the screen if u can it's normal

Great review Tom. Does it have built-in speakers?

Nice review as always, seems like a good monitor.

With regards to gaming above 1080p, I cannot wait until mainstream games start getting optimised for resolutions above 1920x1080.

I suppose it depends on the resolution of TVs, and so what resolutions the games consoles are outputting to the TV. 4k is only a few years away imo, so fairly soon we will be able to play games optimised for viewing in a stunning resolution.

Extremely good screen.I have 1920 resolution Wiew sonic,but this thing is BEAST

That testing part looks like VGA review imho.

Probably to show you how much of an impact the extra resolution will have on your gpu....

Agree.
I wonder ... it was interesting to see the GTX680 chews the extra resolution much better than the standard HD in Batman and Dirt. And even the more GBs of VRAM doesn't helps Radeons, hmmmmm it must be the software optimization or something else ?

What's the input lag on this say vs the U2713HM?

Tftcentral says Asus:16.6ms average and 17ms maximum and Dell:22.2ms average and 28ms max.