My current gaming laptop was a 4.5 years old. Asus RoG i7, 16 gig ram and a 970m card. Runs well enough but I have come in to some money and was looking for a simple upgrade path.
Anyways long story short I choose a HP Omen 17, i7 - 9750, 16 gig ram, RTX2070.
So far really impressed, thing runs great and preformance is superb especially compared to my old laptop, not that my 12 year old son is complaining as he now has it as his first home work laptop in my old laptop and I can get him in to the world of PC gaming and off those consoles ;)
Anyways was wondering on 4k gaming. I dont have any form of 4k tv / monitor and was wondering is it worth picking up a monitor for 4k on this rig, is it beefy enough to run stuff well and is the 4k difference really worth it.
When i built my 2080 Ti rig last year, I wondered the same thing and did a ton of research. Came to the conclusion that 4k gaming isn’t really much of a thing yet, so I got a 1440p 165hz monitor and couldn’t be happier.
Depends. I get by great on less CPU and less GPU than that, and IMO 4K is just gorgeous and well worth the trouble. That said, I don’t need a rock-solid 60 FPS or higher on my games, and a lot of people seem to think that’s important, in which case I don’t think a system currently exists that can reliably do 4K in everything at highest settings and still get 60.
Also, videowise, there’s a lot of DRM-related faff to getting 4K streaming going on PC if a given service even offers it, as far as I know there’s no 4K Bluray player for PC, and there’s not that much of it out there digitally or streaming either one. (Looks real nice when you get it though.) It’s actually much more useful for gaming.
My i9-9900k, 2080 Ti system can do that fairly reliably. Having said that, the only reason I really chose to game in 4K was because my monitor is already 4K, and anything else upscaled looks pretty bad on such a large screen (55"). To be honest with you, I doubt 4K on a native 4K screen looks tremendously better than 1440p on a native 1440p screen, and the extra resolution comes with a pretty hefty performance cost, which I don’t really think is worth it over the higher refresh rate / frame rate and lower response times of a good 1440p monitor.
Most importantly though, is that while a high end system may be able to handle everything at 4K today, it’s going to start to falter with new titles eventually, while that same system would be rock solid for several more years if it only had to push 1440p.
The benchmarks I’ve seen suggest that even a top end card won’t consistently push 60 in today’s games. But I’ve had no problems hitting 30 on my 1080, and that’s all I need. And it’s absolutely a huge upgrade in my book.
I mostly play strategy and simulation/management games, and 4K is awesome (and not too taxing).
I have a 60" 4k which I also use as my primary monitor - the key is the right distance. For controller games I’m on the couch, for anything with mouse and keyboard I have a little micro standing desk that is just big enough for a wireless keyboard and mouse at about 1-1.5 m away from the screen.
Works great for any type of game or basic productivity (sooo much screen space for windows). FPS are fine but I am single player only, so whatever neglible input lag is there would never have mattered to me anyway. For games that are too taxing you can always go down to 1080p scaled up.
If you’re expecting to read at all on the 4K monitor make sure it is Chroma 4:4:4 - I didn’t know this ahead of time and lucked on that the one I had already had this, which apparently makes reading text migraine free.
A good alternative is an ultrawide monitor, which uses a slightly lower resolution and thus is easier on the system. I have a 34" I’ve been using for 2 years, and found it great for games and work. We’ve recently moved which prompted me to mix it up with trying to make the main TV also my main monitor, and if I still like it in a month I’ll sell the ultrawide (we’re in a consolidating mode recently). But ultrawide is highly recommended if you’re mostly in the market for a monitor, not TV.
I hope they fix Outlook / Windows Mail. I can’t tell you how many messages just disappear into the void, and I hate the threaded view that buries messages inside other messages. Like, I need three or four different computers downloading Outlook to make sure that a message that has disappeared on one hasn’t disappeared on the other. Dealing with this right now, super annoying. Literally just a list of messages with no filtering, please.
