So, a couple of days ago I saw this interesting monitor from a brand I've never heard of on sale. A Mancer Valak.
Specs claimed it to be 180hz, HDR, gsync/freesync and curved.
For the price they were asking which was just under $200 I couldn't ignore it, so I took the plunge.
Today it arrived in the box, even had a funny exchange with the mailman as he's a gamer too, told me I'd be having lots of fun with this.
Back of the box was pretty unappealing, just some specs and pics, nothing special.
So I got to building it like a monitor from IKEA lol
Wasn't that hard, just took a few screws to get the stand in place.
I'm not going to lie, this was my first time seeing a DisplayPort cable, looks pretty cool and I'm glad this didn't come with HDMI.
After everything was said and done, my desk was looking like this, finally two screens again, except this time the smaller one will be my main one.
Now, what about the smoothness?
By gosh it's incredible. Before this the maximum I had used was 90hz on my dad's Motorola Edge - this is like a whole other world. Everything feels so much smoother and nicer to do.
I tried out two games I knew would run at 180FPS: CSGO and Trackmania. They both played stunningly and even though I'm pretty rusty at CS, I managed to get quite a good amount of kills. Don't know if that's the monitor or pure luck, but it still felt nice to shotgun people at 180hz.
I've yet to properly try gsync but will be doing that in Cyberpunk 2077 where I get quite a bit of screen tearing.
Now, this isn't just a short positive post as I'm having a problem.
I can't for the life of me figure out how to turn on HDR - even when turning off 1ms response time, the HDR option isn't available, it's just greyed out.
This isn't too large of a nitpick as the colors on show here already look quite great, but it'd be nice to have HDR. I'll try contacting their support and find out what's going on.
Another issue I have is no volume control. Either this monitor has very low audio or there is no volume control at all. It's not too bad since I game with my headphones on, and I can always use the TV as a set of speakers, but it's a shame that the sound is so low.
However, overall it's still a great product that I got for a great price and I can see myself using this for years to come. 180hz is quite overkill in my opinion, I can see why some people go 240hz or even 300hz, but this is more than what I've ever had, and it's glorious.
Thank you PC gaming for letting me have this (even if my old Series S could do 120FPS on some games too),
The exact model of the monitor is the MCR-VLK24-BL01 in case anyone is interested in taking a look.
For now I'll go enjoy some more games at 180hz and some of that gsync goodness, this stuff is new to me! :D
