Asus Rog Swift PG278Q

[Continuity28]

So I have spent a couple of days with the monitor now and have got to the bottom of the issues I was having. Anyone getting one of these monitors new you need to heed the following:
1) If you are coming from 1080p you'll be changing settings, restart the game after you do it! The Nvidia gsync drivers don't seem to like changes in resolution, anything that causes the monitor to reset its mode can cause issues. In game it'll show stutter or worse performance, something a game restart will solve.
2) Almost all games are better with vsync in the options set to off. Some games seem to do frame capping when vsync is on, setting to 60hz usually and you want to avoid that. I have also found in Arma 3 it causes some input lag which isn't there with vsync off. But just like (1) changing and then using it straight away sometimes doesn't turn out so good. I blame the drivers, bad Nvidia hasn't tested that scenario and it shows.
3) Reinstall your Nvidia drivers after the install of the monitor. For whatever reason my games did not perform right until the driver was reinstalled. Metro last light was the first example but the Crew beta also suffered.

Mine is coming Saturday, thanks for the information!

 

[know of fence]

The SLI + G-sync stuff is interesting. At the end of the day two older/smaller SLI cards will never be equivalent to a single bigger card, even when they bench at a higher frame rate.

Of course both GPU makers don't like to remind us of the the fundamental issue, multi GPU setups don't merge into a faster super-card. Instead the GPUs render the same thing completely in parallel, spewing out frames whichever card is first, or since frame pacing the cards try to properly alternate and temporally align or pace the output, delaying certain frames to fit a certain predicted cadence. It sort of works to create more frames, but those deliberate pacing delays kind of defeat the no-delay promise of G-sync.

AT 144 Hz G-sync cannot display frames when they arrive faster than 6.9 ms, with a single card reaching those brief frame times is unlikely unless the frame rate is really high, but with dual GPU SLI it randomly happens all the time, whenever the outputs of two cards mis-align due to a change in 3D geometry. Still a G-sync monitor can handle and display the RAW SLI frame output, much better, so it's interesting if Nvidia will dial back frame pacing for G-sync in their drivers.

With vsync-off all frames ended up on the screen as partial frames, even if they were just several lines high. When frames arrive before the G-sync screen can refresh, they are dropped (or buffered?), so it would be interesting to actually keep track of how often frames are lost this way. Nvidia should make this information available.

 

[Black Octagon]

Brightcandle, thanks for your impressions but I'd really like your thoughts on ULMB (when fps=120 consistently)...and not just on G-Sync. Gag much time to try this out? Either on an old game or by turning settings down to achieve a solid 120fps

 

[Throckmorton]

the point of G-Sync is that you dont need to get all the way to 144Hz, as long as you're around 100fps you're golden (or at least well above 60fps, as there's not much point in a fast monitor like this if you're just going to be hovering around 60 or less).

wanting to push frames as close to 144Hz (or rather 120Hz) is for ULMB.

Don't you benefit from the lower response time at any framerate?

 

[moonbogg]

I was in for this monitor but we just bought a house. If I bought this now, my wife would dig a hole for me in some undisclosed location. Enjoy fellas.

 

[BrightCandle]

Today the monitor started misbehaving just on the Windows desktop. It would black out with signal lost messages and then reestablish the link, and it would do this a few times with increasing rate until it just said there was no signal and stopped working. I turned it off and rebooted windows and it was back, but only for a few minutes before it did the same thing. So I reseated the cable and then it worked for about 15 minutes before doing it again.

On a whim, knowing that Asus overclocked the gsync module to make these monitors and feeling it was quite warm on the casing when changing the cable, I decided to use my desk fan to blow some cool air over the back. Now its been working for over an hour without issue. It could be something more random but its sure looking like it was overheating and then saying it couldn't get a signal on the screen, presumably because the gsync module stopped working.

Considering its just 25.3C (77F) in my house its not really hot enough for a monitor to actually be overheating. I wasn't doing anything than surfing the web either, its not like I am pushing it hard. Considering I use a low brightness setting as well the backlight heat should be at a minimum as well. This could be a major design fault or it could be a faulty monitor in some way (the heatsink fell off perhaps?) but it had been fine on the cooler days up until today.

 

[thedosbox]

That's disappointing. Wonder if Kronvict has had the same issue.

 

[3DVagabond]

I don't know if you want to muck around troubleshooting a bit or not? You can vary the refresh rate I believe. Can you set it @ 120hz and see if that helps?

I hope Asus can help you. I've never heard anything good or bad about their monitor support/service. Good luck.

 

[Kronvict]

That's disappointing. Wonder if Kronvict has had the same issue.

So far i have had no problems that people have reported on multiple forums . Just some minor blacklight bleed but nothing i cant really notice unless im on an all black screen. Stuttering on certain games with SLI and g-sync on (BF4) but that should be fixed via a new driver soon. I did get fry's 3 year warranty just in case for an easy swap.

 

[bystander36]

Today the monitor started misbehaving just on the Windows desktop. It would black out with signal lost messages and then reestablish the link, and it would do this a few times with increasing rate until it just said there was no signal and stopped working. I turned it off and rebooted windows and it was back, but only for a few minutes before it did the same thing. So I reseated the cable and then it worked for about 15 minutes before doing it again.

On a whim, knowing that Asus overclocked the gsync module to make these monitors and feeling it was quite warm on the casing when changing the cable, I decided to use my desk fan to blow some cool air over the back. Now its been working for over an hour without issue. It could be something more random but its sure looking like it was overheating and then saying it couldn't get a signal on the screen, presumably because the gsync module stopped working.

Considering its just 25.3C (77F) in my house its not really hot enough for a monitor to actually be overheating. I wasn't doing anything than surfing the web either, its not like I am pushing it hard. Considering I use a low brightness setting as well the backlight heat should be at a minimum as well. This could be a major design fault or it could be a faulty monitor in some way (the heatsink fell off perhaps?) but it had been fine on the cooler days up until today.

Asus mentioned that they used a 50% larger than normal heatsink on the Gsync module on that particular monitor. I wonder if that increase in size was enough. I'd probably contact customer support and see what they have to say.

 

[BrightCandle]

I contacted Asus support and the guy had never heard of the monitor, told me to connect it to an xbox to test it wasn't my GPUs. So yeah that wasn't very beneficial. But I did get to confirm it yesterday there is an overheating issue and blowing the fan over it fixed it and switching GPUs doesn't, so that is about as definitive as I am going to get. I have the weekend to confirm that it is overheating and then Asus will exchange it after testing and confirming the problem themselves, although how much stock they have for that I don't know.

Its cooling down now so I suspect I wont have a problem now or into the winter, I can't get it to overheat today. But next spring/summer if this is a real design fault we might see a lot of people complaining that its cutting out in this way. For me at least it seems to happen above 25.5 C ambient (was really high humidity as well, pre storm weather).

 

[wand3r3r]

Hopefully asus monitor RMA support isn't like their abysmal gpu rma support.

 

[guskline]

Thanks for all of your input on this monitor, BrightCandle.

 

[jackstar7]

Hopefully asus monitor RMA support isn't like their abysmal gpu rma support.

Based on his experience thus far... I'm not sure how well things are going to go for him.

 

[Subyman]

I contacted Asus support and the guy had never heard of the monitor, told me to connect it to an xbox to test it wasn't my GPUs. So yeah that wasn't very beneficial. But I did get to confirm it yesterday there is an overheating issue and blowing the fan over it fixed it and switching GPUs doesn't, so that is about as definitive as I am going to get. I have the weekend to confirm that it is overheating and then Asus will exchange it after testing and confirming the problem themselves, although how much stock they have for that I don't know.

Its cooling down now so I suspect I wont have a problem now or into the winter, I can't get it to overheat today. But next spring/summer if this is a real design fault we might see a lot of people complaining that its cutting out in this way. For me at least it seems to happen above 25.5 C ambient (was really high humidity as well, pre storm weather).

I don't like it when they have to confirm the problem themselves, especially on something like overheating because their test room could be 60F for all we know or it could have a draft through the workbench the monitor is sitting on. I like how most big retailers do it, replacement with no questions asked. There is nothing to be gained by the buyer to have to ship their monitor in and then get a new one shipped to them.

 

[jackstar7]

Curious how many folks here have this and how their experiences are thus far. I'm also reading over at [H] and it sounds like there are some issues, but it's unclear if it is very isolated and only the afflicted are getting vocal while all the satisfied customers are just gaming like crazy...

 

[bystander36]

Read the last few pages. There appears to be 2 on this thread with it. BrightCandle had a few issues at first, but once he reinstalled the drivers, it appeared to work well.

konvict also has one. He didn't have any issues that we heard, though at high FPS, he prefers UMLB mode.

 

[3DVagabond]

Today the monitor started misbehaving just on the Windows desktop. It would black out with signal lost messages and then reestablish the link, and it would do this a few times with increasing rate until it just said there was no signal and stopped working. I turned it off and rebooted windows and it was back, but only for a few minutes before it did the same thing. So I reseated the cable and then it worked for about 15 minutes before doing it again.

On a whim, knowing that Asus overclocked the gsync module to make these monitors and feeling it was quite warm on the casing when changing the cable, I decided to use my desk fan to blow some cool air over the back. Now its been working for over an hour without issue. It could be something more random but its sure looking like it was overheating and then saying it couldn't get a signal on the screen, presumably because the gsync module stopped working.

Considering its just 25.3C (77F) in my house its not really hot enough for a monitor to actually be overheating. I wasn't doing anything than surfing the web either, its not like I am pushing it hard. Considering I use a low brightness setting as well the backlight heat should be at a minimum as well. This could be a major design fault or it could be a faulty monitor in some way (the heatsink fell off perhaps?) but it had been fine on the cooler days up until today.

I contacted Asus support and the guy had never heard of the monitor, told me to connect it to an xbox to test it wasn't my GPUs. So yeah that wasn't very beneficial. But I did get to confirm it yesterday there is an overheating issue and blowing the fan over it fixed it and switching GPUs doesn't, so that is about as definitive as I am going to get. I have the weekend to confirm that it is overheating and then Asus will exchange it after testing and confirming the problem themselves, although how much stock they have for that I don't know.

Its cooling down now so I suspect I wont have a problem now or into the winter, I can't get it to overheat today. But next spring/summer if this is a real design fault we might see a lot of people complaining that its cutting out in this way. For me at least it seems to happen above 25.5 C ambient (was really high humidity as well, pre storm weather).

Read the last few pages. There appears to be 2 on this thread with it. BrightCandle had a few issues at first, but once he reinstalled the drivers, it appeared to work well.

konvict also has one. He didn't have any issues that we heard, though at high FPS, he prefers UMLB mode.

Huh? Brightcandle's was OTP and putting a fan on it was needed. It wasn't a driver issue. Or did I miss something? Sometimes these forums act up and skip posts on me.

 

[bystander36]

Huh? Brightcandle's was OTP and putting a fan on it was needed. It wasn't a driver issue. Or did I miss something? Sometimes these forums act up and skip posts on me.

You started a few posts after I had. It was as I said, he had issues, reinstalled the drivers, but he did start to run into heat issues later. I forgot to mention that.

 

[Continuity28]

Curious how many folks here have this and how their experiences are thus far. I'm also reading over at [H] and it sounds like there are some issues, but it's unclear if it is very isolated and only the afflicted are getting vocal while all the satisfied customers are just gaming like crazy...

I've had mine since Saturday.

The only issue I've noticed with mine relates to the TN panel; that being vertical viewing angles. If I'm not looking at the monitor dead-on, the bottom is much brighter than the top, which is sometimes distracting. It's the first TN monitor I've owned, so I'm not used to that issue. Every LCD monitor I had before was either IPS or VA.

Other than that, the static image quality seems just as good as the Dell U2410 (H-IPS) I used before, while the dynamic image quality (motion) obliterates the IPS in how smooth it is.

I haven't found any issues with G-Sync yet. When I plugged in the monitor, it automatically had G-Sync set up, and it worked in games. Later on, I decided to install the latest driver "just in case". My video card is a single 780ti.

I haven't really experimented much with ULMB. Enabling ULMB made the screen noticeably dimmer, and I didn't really see the benefit compared to G-Sync, which works very well.

 

[jackstar7]

Thanks for adding that review and your experiences!

 

[Continuity28]

Update: It seems the default gamma (on my monitor at least) was too high. Everything looked a little washed out.

When I did a gamma test, it was about 1.8 gamma instead of 2.2. I had to reduce my nvidia gamma control down to 80%.

Can anyone else check their gamma?

 

[BrightCandle]

Mine is around 2.1 which isn't too awful considering I haven't tried to calibrate this at all (just set the brightness).

 

[Continuity28]

Mine is around 2.1 which isn't too awful considering I haven't tried to calibrate this at all (just set the brightness).

What are your brightness, contrast, color temp settings in the OSD?

Right now mine is set to 35, 50, user mode 100s

 

[Nebor]

Looks like I'll never be getting a monitor from B&H.