Acer Predator XB280HKb

VesoRakia

New member
Ok guys, I am considering some entry level 4K monitors, preferably with G-Sync. As my PC won't be exactly 4K material (single 980ti), I guess I will be playing 1440p most of the time, but really want to have the ability to experience 4K on some of the less demanding games. Also I may do a SLI 980ti in the future if i get too much into the 4K stuff.

Also I have had horrible experiences with Acer products before, so I am kinda skeptical about them (just personal preference), but as this is seems like the only decent 4K, gsync monitor which I managed to find at a reasonable price (about 500 euro), I'd like to hear some opinions.

Please keep the opinions on topic - about the monitor and/or alternative 4K monitors (preferably with G-Sync), and not about my inability to play 4K on a single 980ti and how I should consider a decent 1440p instead, and so on :)

Acer Predator XB280HKb

This review is pretty encouraging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfrQ6UAEmU

P.S. Sory for the incorrect use of 4K when it is UHD, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm ok with either one. My eye is used to 1080p so I don't think I'll spot the difference haha ;)
 
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I have the XB280HK (not B ) model and it's been fine I guess. Build is a little cheap and flimsy and there is some backlight bleed but nothing that matters when gaming on it.

The worst part of it is that it only has one Displayport input so I had to retire my Hackintosh that I used to use on multi input on my older AOC monitor.

Having said that I have had Acer monitors in the past that have failed after a couple of years, so I'm not really expecting it to last for many years.

There really aren't that many 4k/UHD monitors out there with Gsync unless you want to sell a kidney.

Personally speaking as I will say anywhere 4k is really not ready yet. I would give it another year until we get a single GPU that is capable of hitting a solid 60 FPS because right now it's a pipe dream. I don't usually regret buying PC stuff but I do regret going 4k too early and wasting nearly two thousand pounds on GPUs trying to run it.

The worst part of it is that many of the games you play do not come with 4k textures as standard. In fact it's very rare for a game to have a full set of 4k textures so most of the time you are only up scaling any way and it doesn't look any better than 1440p.

Then of course in games that do support full 4k textures like Witcher 3 you will be lowering settings down to achieve a decent frame count and by the time you do that you could have maxed it out at 1440p and have it look just as good.

About the only good thing I have experienced with 4k is the fact that you could put a dog turd in your CPU socket as it doesn't even touch the CPU. That's probably about the only good thing with 4k atm.

It's truly shocking how scant information on gaming at 4k is really. And as usual the reviewers and sales people (because that's what most of them are) are not being completely honest and open about it and make it sound like it's easily done on just one GPU. It isn't, and it couldn't be further from it. 4k absolutely makes your rig break down and cry. Mind you it's the same story as ever. Things like SLI, Crossfire and so on are all thoroughly endorsed by "enthusiasts" yet in reality they are a PITA.

It's amazing how many people bang on about super wide monitors too. Even though most of them had to spend ages messing around with Fallout 4 just to get it to work without crashing at terminals and looking stretched and stupid.

From experience I would strongly recommend 1440p or 1600p but avoid 4k for now.
 
It's truly shocking how scant information on gaming at 4k is really. And as usual the reviewers and sales people (because that's what most of them are) are not being completely honest and open about it and make it sound like it's easily done on just one GPU. It isn't, and it couldn't be further from it. 4k absolutely makes your rig break down and cry. Mind you it's the same story as ever. Things like SLI, Crossfire and so on are all thoroughly endorsed by "enthusiasts" yet in reality they are a PITA.

Excluding AMD (and possibly nVidia) , I don't think anyone has actually claimed a single GPU is good for 60fps 4k gaming. I've only seen marketing crap (and Linus, but he arguably is just a big advert though) that claims a single GPU is good for gaming.

Not everyone has had a really bad experience with Crossfire/SLI but I don't think there has ever been a single person who claims it is 'fault free'.



OP, have you actually tried Gsync? I'd suggest actually trying it out before you go out and pay the extra for a Gsync monitor. The same goes with 4k as well.
 
Excluding AMD (and possibly nVidia) , I don't think anyone has actually claimed a single GPU is good for 60fps 4k gaming. I've only seen marketing crap (and Linus, but he arguably is just a big advert though) that claims a single GPU is good for gaming.

Not everyone has had a really bad experience with Crossfire/SLI but I don't think there has ever been a single person who claims it is 'fault free'.



OP, have you actually tried Gsync? I'd suggest actually trying it out before you go out and pay the extra for a Gsync monitor. The same goes with 4k as well.

I guess I am getting old, but any sort of problem these days no matter how small just annoys me. So that was the end of my SLI/Crossfire run that I had kept going since 2008.

IMO it's dying now any way. Once Pascal et al hit there really will be no need left whatsoever to run either.
 
AlienALX, now that's a constructive answer. I really appreciate it, especially after the quarrel we had in another topic, so thanks for being objective here!

I don't have a problem with the single port at all, and I understand that 4K will probably be something like the 3D on my last build (turn it on a few times, just to decide that it doesn't work as well as I'd like it to and return to normal mode:), but I'd still like to have it there, just for those very few games that I can manage to run 35+ FPSish. Given so, my biggest concern was if the 4K ability, would somehow make the monitor far worse in the 1440p range compared to others (as some 3D-able monitors tend to be quite worse in 2D mode (e.g. interlaced, bad colors etc) compared to equally priced 2D ones).
Having said that I have had Acer monitors in the past that have failed after a couple of years, so I'm not really expecting it to last for many years.
I was really afraid you'd say that. I have had many problems with Acer laptops, and my friends as well. I'm sorry if there are fanboys around but IMHO Acers are extremely unreliable and I usually try to stay as far away as possible from them. That being confirmed If I'm getting this, I'll definetely try to get warranty extension or smth. (I've made the Acer service change my melted laptop GPU 4 times for 1 year :)

All of that taken into accont, as the price I get on this is 500euro, which is not too much more than a higher class (144Hz) 1440p + Gsync the same size, and all the reviews I checked, don't point to any major issues with the picture at lower res, I think I will go ahead and get it (with a nice warranty).

@barnsley Well I never tried Gsync myself but have heard and read mostly good things about it. Especially when 4K is considered. From what I know it won't be much needed when the GPU easily produces the top FPS for the monitor, which with a gtx 980ti and 60Hz on 1440p would be a piece of cake, but the substantial benefit comes when the GPU is pushed to the limit (e.g. on 4K). I was lead to believe that, with the smoothed stuttering/tearing a game running at 40FPS for example, might seem to the eye as if it was actually running on 45-50 for example (I don't rly believe I'll gain 10FPS, but pretty much any gains are welcomed)

Again, I didn't actually experienced this myself, just read about it in a few different sources, so feel free to tell me if I'm wrong.
 
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Yeah Acer are building to a price and it really shows. I've seen a few of their laptops too and they have been very thin and made from brittle plastic, but their spec usually demolishes the competition at the same price point, making them very tempting.

Over the past few days I've really been thinking about it and I think I am going to dump off my 4k monitor after Christmas and go with a 1440p.

Sorry about not mentioning res... Yes you can happily run the Acer @ 1440p in gaming and suffer no ills. However, you can't run the desktop itself at 1440p as it looks like bum. But some one asked me that question before and so I fired up a couple of games (Witcher 3 and Dying Light) and they both looked fine, if a little jaggly (because of the lower res).



^ Witcher 3 running 1440p maxed.
 
Thanks for the elaboration. As far as games are concerned I'm happy that the 1440p res range doesn't suffer from the UHD ability.

For the desktop, I've read that Win 10 is quite well optimised for UHD (with scaling up to 400%), so I will probably have to upgrade my win 8.1 to 10 and use it in 150% scale or similiar (seems like that higher scalings don't really work too good). Does using the Win 10 Desktop at UHD put too much strain on any component or is Windows a piece of cake for the 980ti and my last gen CPU (i7 3770 (nonK)) + 16 GB ram ? That being said I do expect many 3rd party apps (e.g. steam, origin etc etc.) to be quite miniature, but I'll try to work my way around this. I didn't really get why you say the use of 1440p desktop would be crap? Shouldn't it be basically the same as what it would look like on a 1440p 28" monitor, or is there some major difference?
 
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When I got my rig it came with 8.1. First thing I did was remove the 2tb drive for boot and replaced it with a PCIE SSD, then installed 8.1 then upgraded it to 10. This was on day one. For the first couple of weeks it was a bit of a chore because certain apps I use were crashing on load up (so I had to go to task manager kill them then reload them, sometimes multiple times) and I had other issues with Firefox, Chrome and hilariously Edge but those are sorted now.

Obviously you will need some quite chunky Windows updates but once it's all settled in it's perfectly fine. Your rig will run it easily so don't worry about that. You may even be able to overclock your CPU using the turbo bins but I'm not sure due to your board. It's worth looking into though because you can overclock the turbo by 400 MHZ (This was included on all non K series Ivy and Sandy I5 and I7s).

Once you start running 4k though the CPU becomes a distant memory. Last year I was running two Titan Black with a 3970x clocked to 4.7ghz and my motherboard died, down clocking the CPU to 1.1ghz. Now I did notice that during gaming and after a few tests sent my board back for RMA. In the interim all I had to get my rig running was the X79 board and 8c 16t Xeon I have (clocked to 2ghz on all 8 cores) and I lost absolutely nothing in GTAV and a couple of other games I was playing at the time (Witcher 3, Crysis 3).

So don't worry about your CPU at all.
 
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