38GL950 Tips & Tricks & Review

Introduction

So being a massive gamer I just invested in a lg-38GL950G from Laptops Direct (£200 cheaper than Overclockers at the time). And although this is a great monitor there's been a couple of issues points to raised that I thought would help people.

What I think of this monitor!

This monitor is a great piece of kit. For me it was an upgrade to go Ultrawide from my previous Acer Predator 4k2k XB280HK 28" G-Sync Gaming Widescreen LED Monitor which has been fantastic overall but I wanted to upgrade ready for the next Nvidia 3000 series. So what do I think?

Pros

• Super large - Sitting at 38 inches it's a very wide monitor, this did take a few days to get used to but it's great now.
• Sharp - It's a sharp screen on the Nano IPS and is smooth when running at 120hz which I've current got set up (See below for why)
• HDMI/DP Connections - Both DisplayPort (for max settings) and HDMI are both supported so this can be easily switched between devices. As I bought this during the lockdown this was useful as I'm switching between my gaming PC and Laptop.
• Amazing Specs - Toted at up to 175hz, 1ms response this is a beast of a monitor.
• Cool Lighting - The back of the monitor lights has a giant LED ring that can light up. This can be controlled via a button at the front of the screen or via the LG Ultragear control center. With the software you can also sync the colours to the output of your screen or speakers.
• G-Sync - Nvidia's mechanism for syncing output of the card with the monitor, helps reduce tearing. Also this monitor supports Nvidia's new compatibility with Freesync.
• LG OnScreen Control - Allows you to split the screen in to dockable regions that windows can expand to, quite useful for productivity.

Cons

• HDR - The HDR implementation is only 400 which puts this well below competitors and in reviews has been the main down side. 
• Software - Both the LG Ultragear and the LG OnScreen need to start when Windows does but do not minimize on start which is really frustrating.
• 120hz DisplayPort Barrier - There's issues with DisplayPort which means you might not quite get what you were expecting.
• Screen Settings - The settings need adjusting out of the box or you can have problems.

Tips & Tricks

Settings

You should be aware of the settings and what they do, I had a number of problems with screen sleeping.

Deep Sleep

The monitor comes with a feature called Deep Sleep described as "This feature turns the monitor off when there is no signal detected from the HDMI or DisplayPort input after approximately 13 minutes.". However when I first got this monitor I had a really bad issue, whenever I would come back from sleeping the following things would happen as shown in the Nvidia control panel.

1. The name of the monitor would change to something generic
2. The Hz would drop to 80 with no option to put it higher.
3. All the colour settings would drop

This would look terrible and was a very bad issue. To fix this I turned off Deep Sleep following some forum advice which seemed to work (to note I also turned off automatic input switching in case of issue too).

To note the screen still goes off when the signal goes such as when the computer sleeps so I'm not 100% on what Deep Sleep really is.

Main Setup

I wondered when I bought this what the correct settings would be on the front of the monitor for the core settings.

• Frequency - This should match whatever you have your OS set to. For me I used 120hz for the reasons indicated in the next chapter.
• G-SYNC - This should be on if connected to a support graphics card and should be turned on in the Nvidia control panel
• Overclock - This should be false unless you're planning to go above recommend specs
• HDR - True, this will show as true but you have to make sure to turn on HDR in Windows 10
• Response Time - Recommended settings are fast as fastest can cause motion blur.

Frequency, Colour and Response Time with DisplayPort Limiations

So this monitor says up to 175hz 1ms response however this has some caveats.

1. If set to 1ms fastest response time motion blue can occur. Recommend to set to fast in monitor settings.
2.  If you got above 120hz you can get lowering of colour settings for example
• 120hz - Works fine with RGB 10bit Colour
• 144hz - Work fine with RGB but requires lowering to 8bit colour
• above 144hz - This will require you to not only be on 8bit colour but use a setting less that RGB such as YCbCr which can look very bad.

This means on the whole in my mind the best for this resolution with the best frequency, colours and response time is,

120hz / RGB / 10bit Colour with Fast Response Time.