Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Hands-down, single best upgrade to my computer setup by far. Upgrading from HDD to SSD years ago was a huge improvement, but this... this is the Kool-Aid Man busting through the wall. First some relevant system specs for comparison: i7 4770k @4.2Ghz 16GB G.SKILL Sniper Series Samsung 840 EVO EVGA GTX980 FTW Windows 10 My unit did not come with any dead pixels. I had almost forgot to check for light bleed in the corners, got all the way through fiddling with the monitor settings, getting G-Sync running and overclocked it to 100hz (with no issues at all, btw), gamed for a good hour, and did some web browsing before I remembered to check for it. While I did find it when I looked for it, this just goes to show you how unnoticeable it is (I realize, though, I may have just won the lottery on this one). It's like when your friend asks you how bad the mark on their face is, and you wouldn't have even noticed had they not pointed it out to you. I'm coming from a 3x1 multiple monitor setup (3 monitors setup with Nvidia Surround for gaming, and a 4th utility monitor mounted above for miscellaneous use while gaming). The 3 Surround monitors were 26", with a Surround resolution of 5760x1080, it was a lot of real estate. This, width-wise, bumps me down to 3440. Do I miss the extra width? In a word, no. The 3440 with no bezels trumps 5760 with two ~1.5" bezels (from screen to screen between monitors) by FAR. Ideally I would have wanted the width of only two monitors, but one does not simply game with a bezel dead center. Ultrawide 21:9 is the PERFECT gaming width, developer support notwithstanding. Graphically speaking, the 1440 on this vs the 1080 I came from is marginally noticeable while gaming, but noticeable nonetheless. I still have the extra monitor mounted above this one, and moving a window that is nearly filling up the whole screen on the 1080 down to this monitor does well to highlight the extra room available. The 1920x180 feels just so constricting/claustrophobic now compared to the 3440x1440. I have attached 2 pictures to show the difference in size, the first picture is with a window expanded to just about the full 1920x1080 size and the second is that same window moved down to the 3440x1440 monitor. The difference going from 60hz to 100hz (and I'm sure 95hz if yours won't go to 100) was at first disappointing. I was expecting to be blown away. I moved the mouse around... looked normal. I grabbed an open window and shook it around, nothing, still looked normal. Notice I said "at first" up there. I moved the window up to the old 1080 60hz and did the same thing, and I immediately grimaced and thought somehow my monitor had been tampered with or broken while I wasn't looking. What had looked so normal to me before was now unbearably choppy and painful to look at. I had almost completely dismissed the refresh rates when I was researching and shopping for a new monitor, I implore you not to make that mistake. The curve is very subtle. I've never seen a curved display in person before, and was almost disappointed by it when I saw it. I was expecting it to be very prominent. After using the monitor for a bit, I almost forgot there was even a curve, but I think that is a good thing. It's just enough to not look too wide and too flat, while not being anything to have to get used to. Regarding the graphics card needed to game on this, as you saw above I am running it with a GTX980. My game du jour is FFXIV. While I can run the game at Maximum settings, it will only get around 50-60 FPS at 3440x1440 (which is about what I was getting at 5760x1080, I could get 100-120 FPS at 1920x1080). At that framerate there is no point in having this monitor over one of the other ultrawides running at 60hz. I can tweak the settings to a comfortable happy medium of about 75-100 FPS. While the GTX980 is certainly passable with some tweaking, I would suggest if you are looking to get a new graphics card along with this monitor, do yourself a favor and do pickup a GTX980ti. For me, I upgraded from a GTX780 to the GTX980 last year and this monitor was this years upgrade, next year I will definitely be upgrading the graphics card again (especially with Pascal and HBM2 on the way, much excite!). The underside lighting is a nice touch, casts a bit of light onto your keyboard. You do have the option to turn it off if you don't want to use it. They also give you different color options (red, green, blue, white, and MNT Status, which apparently distinguishes between G-Sync on and off), different lighting effects (fixed, breathing, flashing, and ripple), and different brightness levels. The ripple setting is cool but distracting, and I don't know why anyone would want to use the flashing setting. The build quality feels solid and very nice, it feels like a premium product. The port placements in the back leave something to be desired, however. The DP and HDMI ports are set so that they are plugged straight-on into the back, but the cable organizer is off to the side (relative to the HDMI and DP ports) and close enough to the backside of the monitor that the cord has to bend back around, slightly uncomfortably, to go through it. It would have been much, much better had the HDMI and DP ports been set sideways so that the cords come out parallel to the panel. The 4 port USB, while a neat bonus to get, is really only useful for things you will leave plugged into it (wired mouse and keyboard mostly, and really only if you care to cut those two wires down to one), since they are virtually inaccessible in the back. As a side note, they are powered on their own without having to plug in the upstream USB cable, so you can plug in a phone charger, there's an option in the OSD to keep them powered even when the monitor is off, too. Other things of note: -Price, but you knew that already. -The box is big, if you keep your boxes this will take up a lot of room. It is approx. 38"x15"x23" -Comes with both an HDMI and a DisplayPort cable. The DP cable (required for >60hz) is only about 4 feet long, I highly suggest picking up a 6 foot DP cable (I bought this one: Cable Matters Gold Plated DisplayPort to DisplayPort Cable 6 Feet - 4K Resolution Ready). -The included USB 3.0 A to B cable is also about 4 feet long, if you intend to use it I suggest picking up a 6 foot one to replace it (such as this one: Cable Matters SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Type A to B Cable in Black 6 Feet) -As of this writing, this is a fairly hard monitor to get ahold of. If you are serious about wanting to purchase this monitor, I suggest buying directly from Amazon even if it is on backorder (which it has been almost exclusively, they sell almost immediately when they are in stock). I do not recommend buying this from a third party seller because they have been and will likely continue to price gouge due to the limited availability. I had a hard time calling this a $1300 monitor, it is not a $1500 monitor. tl;dr: I love this monitor