Monitor FAQ - PC Guide https://www.pcguide.com Practical Guides to PC & Tech at Home, Work, and Play Sat, 20 Apr 2024 15:02:33 +0000 en-US https://www.pcguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/PCguide-favicon-75x75.png Monitor FAQ - PC Guide https://www.pcguide.com 32 32 What’s the best CPU temperature monitor? https://www.pcguide.com/monitor/faq/best-cpu-temperature/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=12307 Thu, 21 May 2020 13:45:44 +0100 What Is Refresh Rate And How Does It Affect Gaming? Does a Higher Refresh Rate Affect Gaming?To be honest, if you log onto your PC for a quick game of Candy Crush or Subway Surf we don’t think you need a monitor with a high refresh rate, not above 120Hz anyway. But if you’re a serious gamer, spending hours at a time defending your kingdom, or pretend shooting people in their pretend faces, then it’s worth considering a monitor with a refresh rate of between 120Hz and 144Hz.In the past ignorance was bliss when it came to high refresh rates and without experiencing it you would be more than happy with a 60Hz. But it’s something you can’t unsee: play a game once on a monitor with 144Hz and your screen at home will feel ancient. Suddenly you’ll notice the differences, from the trail as you whip your mouse across the screen to the tearing, lagging and low image resolution.Now you know what a refresh rate is, the question remains, does it affect gaming. Yes and no! No, because you’re not going to go from amateur to pro because you’re playing on a monitor with a high refresh rate; you still need to put in the hours to measure up to the stalwarts. However, it most definitely affects your gaming experience, which is at the heart of the matter.

How Does a Faster Refresh Rate Affect Gaming?

There are three major differences between a 60Hz refresh rate and a 144Hz as far as gaming goes. These are: Improved motion resolution Reduced ghosting and tearing Better responsiveness

Improved Motion Resolution

By far the biggest advantage of a monitor with a high refresh rate is the improved motion resolution, which is a fancy way of referring to an increase in sharpness of the moving images on the screen. Higher refresh rates reduce the blurring as our brains make sense of the moving images on the screen quicker than slower refresh rates. Does that make sense? Bear in mind it’s also an individual thing – some people’s brains are able to process things quicker and they’ll notice the difference between a 240Hz and 144Hz refresh rate, while others won’t pick up anything different between a 120Hz and a 144Hz.If you feel notice blurring or something we call stuttering on your screen, then it’s worth upgrading your monitor.

Reduced Ghosting and Tearing

Screen tearing is when the video card spits out frames at a rate that’s higher than the refresh rate of the monitor. Because the monitor can’t keep up with the data being sent to it, it results in half frames, which can be incredibly distracting whether you’re watching a TV show, a movie or playing a game.Depending on the kind of gaming you do it’s important to remember for zero tearing or ghosting, a 120Hz monitor will support up to 120FPS (frames per second) and a 240Hz will manage 240FPS.

Better Responsiveness

Again this is up to the individual. The refresh rate has an impact on the input lag, being the amount of time between refreshes; a 60Hz monitor won’t have an input lag lower than 16.67ms whereas a 120Hz monitor will be around 8.33ms.Ideally, you want a lag time that comes in under 10.9ms as this guarantees a smooth quality gaming experience.

Is a Higher Refresh Rate Monitor Necessary?

As more models appear on the market, the more the prices drop and today you can get a really good 144Hz monitor under $200. Would we upgrade from a 60Hz to a 144Hz, for example? Absolutely, we’re into gaming and the faster refresh rate makes a huge difference. Would we upgrade if we used our PC for day to day tasks and the occasional game? No, probably not.Depending on what you want to do, and what you’re wanting to get out of your screen display, we suggest the following rule of thumb applies – 60Hz is more than okay if you’re watching TV shows and movies. If you spend more time watching live sporting games and movies then we recommend a 120Hz.Serious gamers, however, will probably prefer a 144Hz monitor because of the three differences mentioned earlier: the motion resolution increased responsiveness and the zero ghosting.]]> https://www.pcguide.com/monitor/faq/what-is-refresh-rate/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=3931 Thu, 20 Jun 2019 07:10:49 +0100 What is a 4k Gaming Monitor? What To Consider Before Moving To 4k: Your Operating SystemThere are a few unexpected anomalies when using a 4k monitor for Windows machines. For starters, if you have a small 4k monitor, then everything will look tiny on it. Although you’ll be able to see a lot of content on the screen, it could be hard to read any of it, which is a symptom of their extreme resolutions (3840×2160).Another issue is that desktop web pages are designed for typical display sizes, meaning that you may see a narrow column down one part of your screen. The good news is that if you are willing to invest in a 4k monitor that is large enough, this problem is eliminated!One other solution for using a 4k monitor on Windows is by making a couple of tweaks under the hood. These changes can help fix the problem of small interface elements, thereby making them appear larger, but still sharper than they’ll look on a lower-resolution display.Windows 10 has a set of native scaling features to make the transition to 4k much easier, but even then their solution is far from perfect. Some applications will still look blurry when they’re enlarged to suit a high-resolution display.Window’s rival, Mac OS X, deals with this issue better, as the Retina displays on Apple’s Macs also work with 4k displays. Still, some applications are not up to date to work with 4k out of the box, but most Mac applications are being updated to support high end display scaling.Linux desktops also have different scaling features, as most popular distributions of the open source OS include high-resolution display support.

4k For PC Gaming

A big reason for why people are excited about 4k monitors is their untapped gaming potential — although there are some important caveats here.In order to run games at 4k with high quality settings, you’re going to need to invest in some high-end hardware. The new resolutions provided by these screens are so demanding in fact, that there’s a good chance that you’d prefer low-resolution gaming with more frames-per-second than 4k gaming. Most games today are not yet optimized for 4k, and they might not look as good as you might expect them to.Additionally, 4K demands that get not just one, but two or more top of the line graphics card in order to get the most out of your setup.So in general, 4k gaming is not quite feasible yet due to the extra demands that it places on your rig (and not to mention your wallet). Still, if you’re keen to experiment with the bleeding edge of 4k, then you could get away with using the monitor for games but at lower quality settings, which seems to be the only practical solution, at least for the time being.

Conclusion: Is a 4k Monitor Worth it?

So is a 4k display worth the extra cost, hassle, and expense of updating the rest of your rig? The answer is that it depends. There’s always going to be some growing pains when updating to any new piece of hardware that hasn’t been fully adopted by the market; it just comes with the territory.It also depends on what your intentions are with using the monitor. Because keep in mind that you can use a 4k display for more than just gaming: videos will render incredible detail, photos will look great and have vibrancy to them. In short, there’s a lot of untapped potential for 4k monitors, and we’ve only just started to get the most out of them.4k monitors are perhaps the hottest things to hit the gaming community for this year. But like most things electronic, if you’re patient enough to hold out for a few months to a year, then we should see 4k screens significantly drop in price, as well as giving time for manufacturers and software companies to enable their applications to work with 4k.]]> https://www.pcguide.com/monitor/faq/what-is-a-4k-gaming-monitor/ https://www.pcguide.com/?p=4029 Thu, 20 Jun 2019 07:09:24 +0100