The office got renovated and moved into new digs, so I got a new desk. My old busted monitor became unbearable to look at, so I decided to replace it. But this is still a workplace, after all. I didn’t want to buy anything too nice and look like a show-off. I wanted something cheap, with a resolution I could live with, and a screen big enough to get work done. After some thought, I set three targets for the monitor I needed: Under 1000 yuan, and the cheaper the better 27 inches is the floor, nothing smaller 4K would be ideal, 2K is acceptable I was initially worried that 2K on a 27-inch monitor would break scaling on my Linux setup, but after a rural schoolteacher on Twitter told me that 2K at 27 inches works perfectly fine at 100% scaling, I stopped worrying.

Bought a Dell P2715Q monitor during JD’s 618 sale. This thing only has DP and HDMI. With my current setup, HDMI caps out at 4K 30 Hz, and 30 Hz is basically unusable, so a DP cable was mandatory. I had some UGREEN DP cables lying around from a previous JD order, so I plugged one in. Big mistake. The moment I connected it, the PC wouldn’t turn on. At first I thought the monitor was faulty, or that my GPU (an iChill 770 4G) couldn’t handle 4K. Then I tried a hot-plug and it worked fine, no problem at all. But once the cable was connected, the machine refused to shut down properly, and after shutting down it wouldn’t boot again. After a bunch of testing, I figured out that with this DP cable, the PC just won’t boot. And when it does come back, Gigabyte’s “Dual BIOS recovery” message pops up telling me one BIOS is dead and it restored from the backup.

At work I use a laptop plus an external monitor. Before this there were two monitors lying around: a Lenovo LCD, 22 inches, big white TN panel, completely unbearable. Then the radiology department retired a CRT, a Philips, and it looked surprisingly good — until a few days ago, when that Philips died too. I thought about it for a long time, whether to buy a screen with my own money for the office. Considering that my idiot director has me writing stuff every day and I spend long hours staring at a computer, at the very least I shouldn’t be blinding myself on a big white panel, so I gritted my teeth and picked up an ASUS VS239HR — 23 inches, IPS, VGA/HDMI/DVI. It arrived fast. To my surprise it was a perfect panel with no dead pixels, and the backlight bleed wasn’t too bad either — way better than I expected. Some quick impressions below.