Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I gave this monitor 5 stars because I personally love it. I bought it to play PC games at 4k resolution and built my PC specifically for that. I'm currently running a pair of GTX 780 Ti's which is more than enough to max out just about any game, ultra settings plus 2x aa depending on the game. There are definitely titles out there will exceed the 3GB memory on the GTX 780 or 780 Ti and I imagine that will only get worse as newer games are optimized for this resolution. If you're looking at this monitor for gaming, I would suggest a 780 6GB (in SLI for optimal performance), R9 290X (crossfire for optimal performance 4GB), or if you need the compute performance a GTX Titan would suffice but is not necessary and overpriced for just gaming alone. I even tried the monitor with one single 780 Ti just for testing purposes and was able to set Skyrim at ultra settings, everything maxed and there wasn't a single stutter, screen tear, and virtually no motion blur. That is impressive for me coming from a 120Hz panel. This monitor is simply a plug and play set up, the native resolution was instantly recognized along with 60Hz and that was the case for both a single card set up and SLI. I read some people had issues with SLI but I assure you it works perfectly fine, nothing needs to be manually adjusted aside from activating the SLI setting in the Nvidia control panel. The latest Nvidia drivers work great with 4k. Something to note if you haven't done much research yet is that this monitor will not give you 60Hz with HDMI, you will only get 30Hz, for now anyway. I picked up a displayport 1.2 cable from Amazon as well just to make sure I had the proper compatibility to get 60Hz. The monitor does come with a DP cable but I wasn't sure of the version and didn't want to risk anything. The cable was only $12 and worth it to make sure I was using the right one. The monitor instantly detected the DP cable and set the input itself to reflect that (nice little feature I guess). I wish I could give more input on an AMD GPU set up but unfortunately, I don't own any. I can however, tell you that Nvidia works beautifully with this monitor especially using SLI. Battlefield 4 for example; With all Ultra settings, 2x msaa and SSAO, I was consistently getting 70-90 frames per second and never dropped below 65. One single 780 Ti had playable framerates at Medium settings, no aa and SSAO with between 50-70 fps which is still not bad considering the resolution. And that was on multiplayer which I felt was the best place to test the frames instead of boasting about ridiculously high frames in the campaign. Another example like Skyrim; i was able to completely max out this game at 2160p with a single card. BF4 really is the game that beats up your GPU at this resolution, no matter what you have. With everything maxed out it did introduce a very small amount of screen tearing and it does, expectedly, take a few seconds for the textures to load when you first fire up a match. on to the OSD... It is placed oddly on this monitor but I personally don't care because I make most of those adjustments in the Nvidia control panel. It is located on the back of the monitor towards the bottom right hand corner. It is very easy to reach your hand around back and make adjustments as needed but some may find this slightly complicated and weird. It's also a small joystick which is OK, but that could have been done a lot better. Plenty of adjustments to make, like the usual brightness, contrast, & sharpness. There is an option to adjust the refresh rate which is a generic setting like fast, faster, fastest. Fastest introduced a small amount of ghosting and the monitor was defaulted to faster (which I believe is the native 1ms) and I left it that way because there is miminal motion blur in games and it works perfect for me. There is a game mode setting which cranks up the brightness and contrast eliminating the washed out black areas of games that are mostly seen on TN panels, but in general I didn't care for it. There's also a contrast setting that like game mode, overrides all other setttings and gives you the option of dynamic contrast which some may like for looking at photographs. Not for me though. there's really not much else in the OSD that I messed around with or found necessary to play with. It is a TN panel, but is a new TN panel that offers much better color reproduction, better viewing angles, and less color shifting than previous panels. Again, I only play games on this monitor so I absolutely don't care if it is TN or IPS. I actually prefer TN because they are faster, cheaper and my sight will never be good enough to care about the differences. There is zero adjustability on this monitor, meaning you can't tilt, swivel, or pivot this display. For me, I can't take away a star for this because I simply don't care and never need any of these features. There are many people that do care and it is important to point that out because a lot of people need these adjustments depending on their set up. Take that into careful consideration because the Asus model will sell for $649 and will have all of those adjustments. Other than that, they seem to be indentical panels as far as specs go. I hope this review helps point someone in the right direction who is looking to play games at 4k resolution. Check out the tech sites, there are plenty of benchmarks floating around that will show the performace of many different GPU set ups so you can get a better understanding of the framerates to expect depending on your current set up. With all of that being said, this monitor is gorgeous, games look insanely awesome at high settings, there is tons of desktop real estate (crank your zoom settings up, a lot text gets very difficult to read at this resolution), and i'm very happy with my purchase ($599 preorder) and would recommend it to any PC gamer looking to move on to 4K.