ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q - How unlucky can you get?

After much deliberation and umming and ahhing I decided to order my first G-SYNC monitor, the ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q, from Amazon here in the UK yesterday, literally 30 minutes before the delivery deadline for Saturday.

Well the monitor came this morning at 10:30am but I decided not to set it up until 1pm. However, on opening the box and removing the contents I discovered that the UK three prong power plug was missing from the box and that there was only a US two prong one! That sucks I thought but at least I can use the power plug from my Dell U2515H monitor, right?

Wrong! Seems this monitor comes with an external power brick and while it does have what appears to a three hole kettle connection on the brick itself the power lead from the Dell monitor and my previous HP monitor don't fit. So I have a £700 165 Hz G-SYNC monitor that I cannot even check to see if it works never mind use it. I think I must be the unluckiest person alive right now.

After speaking with Amazon support (their customer service is superb IMO and the reason why I ordered from them) for 30 minutes they have confirmed that they are sending a replacement out today for delivery before 1pm tomorrow. I asked if they could check it had the UK plug before sending it but they said they couldn't (doing so would break the ASUS seal on the box) so I taking a big risk that this second one will have the UK plug. If it doesn't and you hear someone screaming loud tomorrow morning then it will be me!!! :wanker:

The only positive thing I can say about this is that I will have the pick of two monitors, two power bricks, two HDMI cables and two DisplayPort cables if one happens to be faulty. But why, oh, why couldn't it have been the HDMI or DP cable that was missing and not the UK plug.

/cries

 

buy a power converter and plug that two prone plug

 

Why should I? It's a UK compliant monitor that I bought new from Amazon UK themselves and it should have included a UK power cable and plug. I am getting a replacement delivered tomorrow anyway so there's no need to mess around with converters.

I have a feeling that I do have a cable that would work with the power brick but I cannot for the life of me remember where I've seen it. Sods Law says that I will remember when my other monitor comes tomorrow but who knows, maybe that won't have a UK plug either. (Kind of wish I hadn't typed that now though. :3eyes: )

 

This one-time exchange program is open only to customers who purchased the ROG Swift PG279Q in North America, and it’s limited to models from the initial batches. Units with the following serial numbers are eligible:

F9LMQS064281 to F9LMQS066024
F9LMQS085294 to F9LMQS085313
FALMQS088716 to FALMQS089177

http://edgeup.asus.com/2016/03/17/on-backlight-bleed-with-the-rog-swift-pg279q-gaming-monitor/

 

Cool but this has nothing to do at all with the OPs issue.
Hooray for reading.

 

Amazon are crap, I refuse to use them now, I've bought about 5 things over the last few years, 4 never turned up, still waiting on them today, and the last one turned up a week late, was terrible quality so went straight back

No way I'd spend hundreds on computer tech from that place

 

I wouldn't sweat it. You already have your old monitor that works, so this just means you need to wait a bit more. It's not like you're left without a monitor.

 

Others might not know about it. TS issue is a special case.

 

That is bad luck. I have literally ordered thousands of things from Amazon, mostly music CDs and Blu-rays but also the odd TV, graphics card and monitor, and I've never had anything go missing. Only twice has anything arrived late. I switched to Amazon Prime only a year or so back as well, which means I can have stuff delivered on Sunday too (I'm sat here now awaiting the delivery of my replacement monitor by DPD which is due imminently).

 

Yea the last thing I ordered said it would be here on a Monday, I sat in all day waiting, and at 7pm that day they changed the delivery date to upto a week later, it finally arrived on the Thursday iirc

Changing the delivery date at the end of the day it should have arrived? Come on...

The whole point of buying the item I did was because it had a specific delivery date attached, rather than trying to keep someone in the house every day for a week to wait for it, which ended up happening anyway

Good luck with your new monitor though, hopefully it has all the correct leads, I personally would always stick to proper computer e-shops for tech though

 

Just looked at mine and yes its kindof like a kettle plug but not Weird triangular rounded thing , wonder wtf they made them like that for? Unless it was just to piss you off

Its a fantastic monitor though , luckily it was brand spanking and you went through amazon and not Asus shoddy replacement policy

 

So you have to buy replacements from them rather than generic cheap things that make them no money

 

You should check to see if you're eligible for Prime Now, you get automatic access as a Prime member but I'm not sure if they've rolled it out in all areas yet. You can get all the same sorts of products you can from Amazon (although a smaller selection) but with delivery within 1-2 hours of placing the order.

I use Amazon all the time tbh and they're absolutely fantastic, Prime Now is especially useful.

 

Amazon do sell them , not that you should have to buy your own with a monitor that price ha ha


https://www.amazon.co.uk/UK-plug-Laptop-power-lead/dp/B000XG4YB2

 

Ah OK those, yea they are common with laptops power bricks, they're called Cloverleaf power leads

 

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I was sat basically in front of my door awaiting the DPD driver and got a message on my phone via the DPD app that he was unable to deliver! Apparently, because the iron gate to my terrace was locked (for security reasons), he had decided not to bother parking around the back to deliver but instead take a photo of some plants at no. 22 at the end and claim he left a calling card!

I quickly rang Amazon who called me back immediately but despite claiming they have asked the driver to call back and redeliver he has not done so and the more time that passes then the further he will be away from me. Amazon even gave me DPD's customer support number, which I called, but they said the driver was not answering his phone, possibly because he was making a delivery. I have unlocked the terrace gate though, not that I should have to as there is parking space and garages with access to the properties at the rear. Stupid DPD drivers! Grrrrrr!

I am back at work tomorrow and no-one will be home during the day so I have no chance of getting this replacement before next Saturday at the earliest. Maybe I shouldn't have started this thread as I seem to have cursed myself. Talk about a ruined weekend...

 

Just go to your local PC shop, Argos, maybe even somewhere like ASDA, and ask for a Cloverleaf power lead, then you can use your original monitor

 

Actually, and I'm almost afraid to type it here for fear of jinxing things again, I ordered a cloverleaf UK plug from Amazon yesterday for delivery today (maybe... eek!) on the off-chance that the replacement monitor was still missing the UK plug. I was obviously not expecting the monitor to not be delivered at all!!!

 

Wouldn't it have arrived with the monitor that couldn't get through the gates today?

 

Well that's the question, isn't it, as I didn't want to take the risk of it being missing in that one too so I decided to pay £7 for a separate cloverleaf lead with free delivery (I'm a Prime user). Good job I did because the monitor was not delivered but the cable did come around 2pm...

... and it seems to work perfectly fine with the monitor so I have been playing around with it since then.

The monitor is absolutely stunning, I have to say. It's only 2" larger than my 25" Dell U2515H monitor but it feels noticeably bigger, like it's 30" or something (it's 27"). The colours are also fantastic and a notch above even my Dell which I still think is a great monitor but it's limited to 60 Hz. I enabled 165 Hz and set the desktop resolution to that. Moving the mouse and windows even scrolling up and down in a browser just looks fantastic now with much clearer motion than I ever saw on a 60 Hz display. I think it's fair to say that high-refresh rate monitors are something that you might not need or even want but once you actually use one then there's no going back!

As for G-SYNC, I enabled the setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel for both fullscreen and windows and reactivated DSR (since it set to Off for some reason). I then tested a number of games including MXGP3, RiME, Formula Fusion, Outlast 2, Skylar & Plux (oddly all Unreal Engine games), unchecked v-sync and played them to see how they felt. All of those games run way above 60 fps and yet they felt silky-smooth with only a couple of instances of judder (in RiME but I suspect that's the engine). It really is amazing to see and it's perhaps unfortunate that the only way to see is to actually view the monitor running games yourself.

Unfortunately, running games above 60 fps means higher temperatures but the highest I saw was 78 C while playing MXGP3 at 4K and maxed out settings where it averaged around 90 fps. I had to restart my PC though as I noticed some games were not showing the DSR resolutions and maxed out at 2560x1440. MXGP3 also crashed with a LowLevelEngine error, something about losing signal with the graphics card and when I checked the Event log it showed a display driver crash and recovery. My GTX 1080 Ti SC2 is running +100 MHz on the core (already overclocked by EVGA from the base value) and +500 MHz on the VRAM though and this was 100% stable in every game when I used v-sync on a 60 Hz display. It obviously isn't quite as stable with uncapped framerates and v-sync off though as the GPU is almost always hitting 99% usage so I may have to monitor (no pun, intended!) that over the coming days to see how stable it really is.

I am a bit confused about G-SYNC though such as:

1. I disabled v-sync in the games but many were already running up to 165 fps so can I leave it on or does it have to be disabled for G-SYNC to work?

2. Does G-SYNC work with UWP games like Forza Motorsport 6 APEX which does not have an option to disable v-sync? It ran over 100 fps in places (at 4K!) but the experience felt disappointing as there was stuttering.

I loaded up Forza Horizon 3 and turned off v-sync in that game and that felt absolutely fine even though the framerate was anywhere between 65 and 135 fps (again at 4K). There is a framerate limiter in that game but it seems to be bugged since it shows not just 165 fps but 33 fps, 41 fps, 55 fps and 83 fps! Not sure why that is, I was expected standard settings such as 60, 120 and 144! :3eyes:

3. Can you set the framerate cap in a game to, say, 120 fps, and enable v-sync on these monitors and still have a smooth experience even if the framerate drops below 120 fps. Or do you set 120 fps and disable v-sync so that G-SYNC can work properly.

I don't necessary want to run a game at 165 fps but, say, 90 or 120 fps. This reduces heat and also makes my overclock potentially more stable. Can you do that with G-SYNC?