It took about 4 days to get this monitor completely up and running but I’m exceptionally pleased with it for both office work and gaming.
I upgraded to the MSI MPG ARTYMIS 343CQR from another great monitor, the ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q. The primary reason I upgraded is I needed more screen space for office work and I prefer to have a single monitor as opposed to a dual monitor setup.
Below are my observations in no particular order.
1) It’s really curved. The first hour of looking at this monitor I felt like I was getting a headache. I never got a headache and the feeling has never returned, but my eyes clearly had to go through a quick period of adjustment since I’ve never used a curved screen before.
2) It’s really wide. For office work, I often need to have two or three documents side by side so the ultra wide format is perfect. For games, it’s awesome to have such a huge field of view. I tend to play FPS and top down strategy games and both types really shine on such a wide monitor.
3) Getting the DisplayPort to work consistently required purchasing a high-end cable. When I first connected the monitor I used an HDMI cable and had no issues. Then when I wanted to play a game I connected my existing DisplayPort cable which had worked fine with my previous monitor. The screen would display for only a few seconds before getting fuzzy and then turning black. I then switched to the DisplayPort cable that came with the monitor. This worked for only a short time before the screen would go black. I switched my video card to an old Nvidia 670 and the DisplayPort cable worked with no problems. So then I switched back to my Nvidia 1070 and encountered the same problem again. Apparently this problem can occur with DisplayPort and some research online suggested I upgrade the DisplayPort cable. So I ordered an IVANKY 1.4 braided and shielded DisplayPort cable from Amazon and that solved the problem. I have no idea why this worked but it did.
4) The extra screen real estate needs extra horsepower for graphically demanding games. I have an Nvidia 1070 video card and had to reduce the anti-alias and texture detail slightly to keep the same frame rates as my previous Asus monitor. But once I started playing a game I couldn’t really tell the difference. I had hoped to upgrade my video card at the same time I purchased this monitor but that is on hold until video cards are more readily available at reasonable prices.
5) No screen tear, ghosting or flickering. I have not notice any screen tearing, ghosting or flickering while playing games. I even turned on Free Sync in the monitor and G-Sync on my 1070 but didn’t notice any difference. The monitor is not certified as G-Sync compatible so it may have not had any effect.
6) No bloom. While I loved my Asus monitor, it did have bloom in two corners, which can happen for IPS panel monitors. It wasn’t really noticeable in games but it was there. This monitor, which uses a VA panel, is very uniform in displaying a black screen with no bloom.
7) HDR is a work in progress. I turned on HDR and had a screen that was much too bright with too much color saturation. I’m going to have to read up on how to configure HDR but for now I’m leaving it off. Also, once I turned it off in Windows I had to reboot my PC to for the monitor to revert to non-HDR.
8) It can be very bright. The default settings for brightness, contrast and sharpness were fine. I experimented with the brightness and was able to turn it up to the point where it was almost painful, especially playing games in a dark room. So I’ve reverted to the default setting.
9) Color is very good. I don’t work with graphics but the color on this monitor seems just as good as my previous Asus monitor.
10) Excellent contrast. The biggest and most noticeable difference between this monitor and my previous Asus monitor is the contrast. Blacks are a very deep black and anything colorful really pops. Playing games on this monitor in a dark room is amazing.
| Standing screen display size | 34 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1440 x 1440 |
| Max Screen Resolution | 3440 x 1440 |
| RAM | 32 GB |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 4 |
