G-SYNC DIY Kits Now Available

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by PhazeDelta1, Jan 14, 2014.

  1. Tarkan2467

    Tarkan2467 Guest

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    I bought it. Price higher than I expected but I decided I didn't care. Arrives tomorrow. We'll see how it goes.
     
  2. NAMEk

    NAMEk Guest

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    If you can be so nice and post your experience, but please be impartial, i know that it's hard to be impartial when you pay 200$ for something that is really not worth the price, but since there aren't any alternatives and you have money - i understand.
     
  3. V@IO

    V@IO Master Guru

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    this is a big fail at $200
     
  4. IcE

    IcE Don Snow

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    Wayyy too expensive. Maybe I'd pay that much if a Nvidia or Asus rep came to my house and installed it.
     

  5. southamptonfc

    southamptonfc Ancient Guru

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    I bet they sell out in no time.
     
  6. southamptonfc

    southamptonfc Ancient Guru

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    Nice one. Please ignore all the jealous morons. These people are obviously not real gamers and don't understand the potential benefits of this.

    I look forward to hearing your review!
     
  7. 3dPlayer

    3dPlayer Banned

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    Wow! Here is a man with some balls. :D

    Hope to here more from you sir.
     
  8. anticupidon

    anticupidon Ancient Guru

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    I stopped when i read Only compatible with Asus VG248 QE
     
  9. NAMEk

    NAMEk Guest

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    You damn right, some of us still have lives and what to think about =)
     
  10. tugCREW

    tugCREW Member

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    $200! ouch!
     

  11. Andrew LB

    Andrew LB Maha Guru

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    The installation is much easier than i had expected. no soldering or anything. This is cake compared to replacing all the capacitors on the power board for a friends Samsung LCD not too long ago.

    And to the AMD owners who feel the need to criticize... why complain about something you can't use? Oh yeah... it's because you criticize anything nVidia does. If AMD were allowed to use this tech for free, i'm sure you'd be all for it. Kinda like how excited AMD owners were when they were able to get nVidia's PhysX to work on their cards, and once nV changed the drivers so they couldn't, they resorted to calling it a gimmick and pointless.

    And what did they promise? Everything I read back in October said $175-$200.

    If they sold it for just a little more than it cost to produce, how do you expect them to make up the millions of dollars it cost to research, develop, and design the tooling required to make the actual product?

    Maybe you didn't watch the video but it's not a simple chip. you pretty much remove the guts of the display and replace it with a whole new board. That's not a cheap upgrade.

    ... some people really have no concept of what's involved in manufacturing a product.
     
  12. NAMEk

    NAMEk Guest

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    Yeah i don't understand really...I design and make pcb's for my own purposes, i know how much parts and most of the things cost. My parents work in the factory which produces finished products - multilayer pcb's with soldered parts on it. Those machines which collect pcbs can be reprogrammed to make any other product you want. Usually one board to make costs cents. So don't throw at me garbage you don't know. And thing is, that the chip itself has biggest price of that whole product, because making of the chip is most delicate part....But for one you're right - how they would make millions.
     
    Last edited: Jan 16, 2014
  13. southamptonfc

    southamptonfc Ancient Guru

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    Stop replying to Trolls and REPORT man! How good is it???
     
  14. k1net1cs

    k1net1cs Ancient Guru

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    So, what are you waiting for?
    Go and make your own equivalent of a G-Sync board then report back how much that costs, including the time you'd take for figuring out how you can make it work just like G-Sync.

    If you can undercut Nvidia, you'll make millions!
     
  15. Tarkan2467

    Tarkan2467 Guest

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    I've had the mod installed since Wednesday night, and though I haven't tried everything yet, I'll be out of town for the next week with no access to the monitor. So here are my initial impressions.

    The installation is not terrible, but it's definitely not for the average person. I've built several PCs over the years but never attempted a mod of this kind. I found it to be moderately challenging. The included documentation was very good and the video is a godsend, though the NVIDIA rep makes the process look deceptively simple (e.g. by ripping off cords as if they're barely attached). It took me an hour, though I was intentionally moving very slowly to double-check every step against both the documentation and the video. In the end, I managed to install the mod with no damage to the monitor.

    The included PCB is huge (around 18 inches in length) and it replaces the two original PCBs inside the monitor. As far as I can tell, the installation is essentially a replacement of the monitor's entire electrical guts.

    Something I noticed (which I believe was also mentioned in at least one G-Sync review) is that the metal bracket covering the AC plug can't be easily secured to the chassis. I thought the reviewer had to have missed something, but no - you can't do it. Also, the bracket shown in the video contains notches similar to the original part, but the version of the bracket in the kit doesn't even have those. I ended up buying some electrical tape to fix it in position, and since I had the tape at that point, I taped the chassis to the monitor in a couple of additional spots for my own peace of mind (it was taped to begin with). It annoyed me that I had to do this, but I got over it.

    When you turn the monitor on, pressing Menu brings up a new OSD. The only functions I've found so far are the Info screen (which shows resolution, refresh rate, and whether or not G-Sync is running) and the Brightness adjustment. Initially this appeared to be a significant downgrade, but the NVIDIA documents also contain this line about the monitor's specs post-mod:

    "NVIDIA G-SYNC OSD with additional support for Monitor Control Command Set PC-based utilities for superior RGB color control. (utilities not supplied)"

    With Entech Taiwan's softMCCS tool, I was able to adjust Luminance, Contrast, RGB balance and white point, and the updates were saved to the monitor as they would have been if they had been updated via the original OSD. So nearly all of the customizability is still there under the hood, and I assume this is what that statement was referring to. However, I did not see a noticeable improvement in color control - the monitor still presents the same set of complications in that area. Some time back, I found an ICC profile to correct colors on the desktop for this monitor, and I'm continuing to use it.

    Once I got past the installation and exploring these side features, I paid more attention to the G-Sync tech itself. The driver detected the monitor and automatically enabled G-Sync. I then tried out several games - Bioshock Infinite, Half-Life 2, Metro 2033, Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft, and a couple versions of 3DMark. In every game and in 3DMark, it worked exactly as expected - no tearing and no perceptible input lag at all. Other than minor stutters related to texture loading and game processing (which G-Sync obviously won't fix), the motion was perfectly smooth.

    Probably the cleanest example I came across in my limited testing was Mass Effect 2 when walking around inside the Normandy. It's a high-contrast area with metal supports surrounding the control center and lots of decals on the walls. This is one of the areas where I most often notice tearing and stuttering with V-Sync off. With V-Sync on, the tearing is naturally gone but this area still shows a lot of stutter on my machine as the frame rate will oscillate around. G-Sync removed both issues and the motion was consistent and steady. Just walking around this room was incredibly immersive.

    I've already went on longer than I meant to, but here are a few more random observations:

    • I saw one review that mentioned a performance drop due to G-Sync polling and I can mostly corroborate this (albeit using 3DMark11). Score went from P9800 with V-Sync off to P9529 with G-Sync on (about a 2.8% drop). However, the smoothness of the benchmark while it was running fooled me into thinking the FPS was significantly higher - as long as I didn't look at the FPS counter. Also, it is difficult to quantify the difference exactly. At a 144Hz refresh rate with G-Sync enabled, 144 fps is the fastest that the benchmarking tool will render, so that cap likely counts for part (though probably not all) of the difference.
    • 144Hz still looks much better than 60Hz even with G-Sync. It is not very noticeable when watching a video, but when moving around in an FPS, you will still feel the difference immediately.
    • LightBoost can be instantly activated in-game by pressing the button on the monitor immediately to the left of the power button. G-Sync must be disabled and the monitor must be running either an 85Hz, 100Hz or 120Hz refresh rate for this to work. As usual, it is significantly dimmer than normal display, but there is no red tint or other color corruption like there was with the workaround implementation.
    • As I think most suspected, borderless windowed mode does not trigger G-Sync on the monitor (the OSD shows it is disabled).
    • I have the G-Sync monitor set up as the primary monitor in a dual-monitor setup. I've had no issues with G-Sync enabling or disabling incorrectly due to the presence of the second monitor, which is also behaving normally.
    Hope this information helps. Expense, proprietary nature and the other issues aside, I'm very pleased with my purchase and excited that a technology like this is finally available in some form.
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2014

  16. alanm

    alanm Ancient Guru

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    ^ Great review! Of course I wont be running out to buy the mod. I have patience and will wait a year or more for a wider selection of monitors to carry it.
     
  17. NAMEk

    NAMEk Guest

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    Seems you don't know how the things work in the world, i won't gonna discuss it with you. And that wasn't my point, my point was it's way too Overpriced.
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2014
  18. NAMEk

    NAMEk Guest

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    Thank you for Review Tarkan.
     

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