For the first time in years, ok closer to a decade, I have decided to upgrade my monitor. I have always wanted a curved screen. The few times I have used one it felt immersive and frankly, futuristic. The kid in me loves the future.

There is a lot to consider when buying a new monitor, panel type, refresh rate, pixel density, max resolution, and the video card. The first time I bought a monitor I only had to consider, size and whether is was flat or concaved. Flat, flat was the answer back then.

I mostly use my machine for gaming and web browsing or watching videos. My rig is an Intel i5-6600K, 16GB of Ram with an EVGA GTX 1070 Ti and I didn’t want to spend any money upgrading it. That turned out to be a defining factor in which monitor I would get. 4k monitors are great if you have a machine that can support your favorite games at that resolution. You will want to play your games at the monitors native resolution.

Turning to Toms Hardware for guides, I found their monitor buying guide and best of gaming monitors and best of 4k gaming monitor guides informative. They are worth reading to know the current state of monitors and where they are headed.

The consensus was that my video card could handle a 4k monitor. It was on the lower end of being able to keep up with some modern games at that resolution. I purchased the Asus PG27VQ WQHD Curved G-SYNC Gaming Monitor 165Hz 1440p 1ms with Eye Care Aura Sync.

It is like night and day upgrading from an old Dell LCD Monitor [tk]. I have been using it for over a month at 165hz. The curve makes games feel immersive. It has USB3 ports but they are in the back and behind a removable panel, making them only really useful for things you setup once, such as a webcam.

If you are running the latest generation of video card such as NVIDIA 20XX line and have some extra cash. There are a couple of 200hz monitors that seemed quite nice. Asus Rog Swift PG35VQ and Acer Predator X35