Ever dreamt about the ultimate gaming monitor? Okay, maybe not.
But if you did, it would be an enormous (say, 65-inch?) panel with all the features for the highest of high-performance gaming: a built-in sound system, G-Sync support, a 4K native resolution, an extreme refresh rate.
Ourselves, we woke up and found HP's TV-size Omen X Emperium 65 ($4,999.99) on our test bench.
Dream screen or not, it sets a new standard for sheer monitor audacity.
Provided you have an equally outrageous gaming rig to push 4K at extreme frame rates, the Omen X Emperium 65 will blow away everyone in its sight lines, with rich color and buttery-smooth graphics.
Our key concerns—the price, plus the supporting cast of hardware to leverage it—are far from trivial.
But the day after you hit Powerball, settle your debts, and set up your loved ones for life, put one of these on order (along with a monster gaming PC, and that Bugatti Chiron).
Anatomy of a Behemoth
The Omen X Emperium 65 belongs to a class of monitor that Nvidia, which spearheaded this initiative, has dubbed BFGDs (officially, for "Big Format Gaming Displays," whatever else you might think).
These 65-inch monsters, first unveiled at CES 2018, incorporate Nvidia's G-Sync adaptive-sync technology, as well as the Nvidia Shield streaming hardware and UI, which lets you stream Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, and other content at 4K.
The BFGDs can manage frame rates of 120Hz or higher, and are certified for VESA's DisplayHDR 1000 standard.
The latter means they can handle HDR content and have a peak rated brightness of 1,000 nits, which the Omen X Emperium nailed in testing.
In addition to HP, Acer and Asus have announced their intentions of making BFGDs, but HP's is the first to market.
Therefore, it's safe to say that you've never seen a computer monitor anything like the HP Omen X Emperium 65—because nothing like it has existed up until now.
You could easily mistake this colossus for a very large-screen HDTV.
It has a 64.5-inch viewable area (measured diagonally) with native 4K UHD resolution (that's 3,840 by 2,160 pixels), and it supports refresh rates of up to 144Hz.
The panel makes use of vertical alignment (VA) technology, illuminated by 384 zones of full direct-array LED backlighting.
This monitor is more than 15 inches larger than the next-biggest monitors we've reviewed, the gaming-centric Samsung CHG90 49-Inch Curved Ultrawide Monitor and the Dell UltraSharp 49 Curved Monitor (U4919DW), a business display.
Compared with the rest of today's gaming monitors, when you sum up its size, capabilities, performance, and price, the Omen X Emperium 65 is in a class of its own.
The Omen X Emperium 65's matte-black cabinet measures 32.8 by 57 by 3.3 inches (HWD), exclusive of the depth of the feet.
Top and side bezels are practically nonexistent, given the overall screen size (a mere eighth of an inch wide each), and the bottom bezel is just half an inch wide.
The back of the cabinet is molded at a slant, with a number of tiny, diamond-shaped holes cut into the angled section for heat dissipation.
(We measured its power usage at 255 watts with a Kill A Watt electricity usage meter.)
In the middle of the back panel is a diamond-shaped HP Omen logo in metallic red, bracketed by four holes for a VESA mount.
The power-cord socket is to the left of the logo, as are an on/off button and a mini-joystick control.
The controls are the size they would be on an ordinary monitor and look comically tiny on this enormous cabinet.
Also in back, running most of the width of the cabinet, is a thin but bright RGB lighting strip.
It shines red by default, but you can set it via the onscreen display (OSD) to glow in a range of colors, or to match the screen color as an ambient backlight.
You can also turn it off altogether, which you may prefer if you find it distracting or choose to wall-mount the panel.
The ports are, blessedly, side-facing, instead of the downward-facing back ports typical of today's junior-size monitors.
Two USB 3.0 ports for charging devices are on the right side (when viewed from the Omen X Emperium 65's front), with the rest of the ports on the left: an Ethernet jack, two DisplayPort 1.4 connectors (with HDCP support), three HDMI 2.0 connectors (also with HDCP support), one S/PDIF out, and a 3.5mm audio-out jack.
In a nice touch, the bank of ports on the left side has some backlighting that illuminates the connectors automatically when you bring your hand near.
This beast tips (if not breaks) the scales at 71 pounds.
You'll need to have at least two people on hand to assemble and position it.
(Some minor assembly is required, using an included Allen wrench.) The panel can be mounted either atop its included soundbar or fastened to a pair of feet that prop up either end of the panel.
In the latter case, you can leave the soundbar placed in front of the monitor.
Whichever installation configuration you choose adds about three inches to the height.
Alternately, as mentioned, the Omen X 65 has VESA-mount holes that enable it to be wall-mounted (with the soundbar attached).
A Bit of Background: Who Needs a 144Hz Display?
One big question that's been asked since the BFGD monitors were first shown off back at CES in 2018, and rightfully so: Who are these enormous high-speed displays for, exactly?
Aside from the obvious answer ("people who want to burn a Saturn-sized hole in their pocketbook"), as with everything, there's nuance.
First and foremost, gamers who lust after ever-higher screen refresh rates are usually (though not always) focused on competitive multiplayer esports titles.
Take the hyper-popular game Rainbow Six: Siege, for example.
This is a game that's very reliant on lightning-fast reflexes and reaction times...but you can only react to what you can see, right? This is where high-refresh displays come into play.
Let's say that Player A is using a standard 60Hz monitor.
(That's the refresh rate of most non-gaming LCD panels in circulation.) That screen is updating the visual information provided by the game 60 times every second.
And while that may sound plenty fast for most of us, to the dedicated gamers out there it feels like being stuck behind an Oldsmobile in the fast lane.
Meanwhile, A's opponent, Player B, is using a monitor that features a 240Hz refresh rate.
That means the screen is updating four times as quickly as the example above (240 times per second), which in theory, means Player B, while perhaps not reacting four times as quickly to onscreen events, sees them updated in much greater granularity of time.
So while Player A is acting on a coarser time scale, looking at Player B's precise location onscreen, Player B has already lined up a precision sniper shot during those critical slivers of a second while Player A is processing what he or she sees.
Now, we're dealing here with fractions of a second and the limits of human reflexes, so it's not quite as simple as that 4x multiplier suggests.
But in online games, snap reflexes measured in those terms do count between expert players.
This faster stream of visual information provides a significant competitive edge in games like Siege and the esports staple CS:GO, and it's the main reason why gamers are willing to shell out the extra cost that high-refresh displays demand, and the high-end video cards to push all those frames.
So, Where Does This Leave the BFGD?
Well, in a bit of a "monitor-in-the-middle" situation.
First off, many competitive CS:GO players will actually opt to turn their in-game resolution down to 720p, even on 1080p screens, not just for the faster frame rates but because the increased model sizes and rougher edges make it easier to see enemies around corners.
So that's something of an argument against 4K in a multiplayer gaming scenario.
Plus, gamers of this ilk tend to prefer smaller screens (24 inches seems to be the sweet spot), because it makes it easier to keep the whole frame in view from a closer distance.
You have to be pretty far from the Omen X Emperium (think, couch-to-TV distance) to see it all at a glance.
Second, and perhaps more important, very few AAA games right now (multiplayer or otherwise) are optimized well enough to run consistently at 144 frames per second (fps) at 4K resolution.
You can fix that, in part, by brute force and a lot of money: running two GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards in a very specialized setup (one that will cost you, at bare minimum, roughly $3,500 on top of the cost of the BFGD).
We decided to give that ultimate configuration a try, given we have this BFGD in hand and the supporting gear.
We "scrounged up" two GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards and bonded them in an NVLink twin-card configuration with a new NVLink bridge in our usual video-card testbed computer.
(For those keeping a shopping list, that's $2,500 for the two cards, plus the necessary bridge.) As you can see below, even when running on a top-of-the-line testbed, a dual GeForce GTX 2080 Ti setup was only able to get six of our typical testing games above even the 120fps mark at top detail settings—in other words, the zone in which the BFGD shines.
(Again, it tops out at 144Hz.)
Of those, two are highly optimized multiplayer games (which, as we already mentioned, don't make a whole lot of sense to play on this display), and three are titles that are three years old or more.
The last is Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which only just got an optimization update during the writing of this review that took its results from 103fps to the 143fps you see above.
However, with all of that in mind, there is plenty to be said for smoothness.
If you're the type of person who already has $5,000 to blow on a monitor for gaming, it's likely that the extra four grand or so needed to help it sing in its best key won't break you, either.
And seeing the difference here in PC Labs between a 60Hz 1080p monitor and, say, a 3,440-by-1,440 120Hz monitor, we can fully appreciate the argument for smoother gameplay.
Everything just flows more naturally and looks better at higher refresh rates, especially in single-player games.
So, although the BFGD is not the kind of high-refresh display you'll want to take with you into multiplayer arenas (due to both its gargantuan size and the practicality of playing at 4K in competition), it will still enhance the experience of single-player, couch-based controller gaming for anyone who can afford it...in the same way a vintage Dom Perignon enhances a meal, versus just "ordinary" Champagne.
But given the frame rates we saw in our NVLink experiment, the BFGD is clearly getting ahead of the abilities of today's video cards with cutting-edge games at high detail settings.
It's an investment in your next gaming PC, too, not just your current one.
Wielding the Shield
Ever since Steve Jobs declared his war on buttons, product designers have been trying to match his phobia with sleeker, touch-sensitive devices that try to minimize the number of inputs.
This can make for some sexy-looking tech, as well as some frustrating user-interface problems, like those we ran into with the Nvidia Shield platform embedded in the Omen X Emperium 65.
The Shield itself is fine; it's essentially an Android TV reskin with Nvidia colors thrown on top.
Standard apps for key content platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, and YouTube all make an appearance.
You also have the option to install Android games directly to the device.
But the frustrating part is the remote, and how it behaves once you're in the Shield application.
For example, we wanted to change the brightness of the picture when testing 4K video clarity in YouTube.
Cool, should just be able to press the ol' menu button here and...oh, no, that pauses the video.
Well, surely this button with a vague circle on it will do the trick? Nope, that just hot-swaps between apps.
Okay, maybe Google Assistant can help out.
"Hey Google, open the display settings menu." "I did not understand your request".
Sigh, of course not.
Eventually, we found out that the only way to get back to the display menu (to handle anything from brightness settings to changing inputs) is to completely exit the app you're using, use the drop-down settings gear from the top-right corner, and choose "on-screen display menu" from that menu.
We needed a menu to open the menu.
Not ideal.
A further befuddlement: All of these buttons change function when you're hooked into your PC.
The circle button becomes your display menu (so does the middle button), and the arrow keys don't do anything unless you're using the display menu.
Overall, all this combined made for an unintuitive UI to deal with.
You don't have to use Shield as your main media hub, of course, though it's no doubt nice that it's there if you want it.
Just know that there is a learning curve unless you're already a Shield convert.
These frustrations can be part alleviated by attaching either a mouse/keyboard combo or an Xbox gamepad directly to the TV, though.
Using these input methods was far more intuitive than the included Shield remote, and if you've got a wireless adapter hooked up to your Xbox gamepad, in essence it works all the same.
The Omen X Emperium 65 also lets you connect external USB storage devices directly to the TV, and access any photos, videos, or even regular files both locally or through the internet if you choose to mount the files to your Nvidia Shield account.
This was a nice little unexpected touch, and adds a bit of credence to the argument that the Shield could act as your main media hub if you're more interested in watching your own downloaded content than anything else.
More Streaming Stuff in Shield
Given that the BFGD is destined for your living room or den, it's no surprise to see that HP included Nvidia's Shield game-streaming application as a default in the display.
This lets you push a game signal over your Wi-Fi network from a remotely situated PC to your Omen X Emperium 65 panel, without the need to run a display cable between.
Also in the UI here is access to Nvidia's GeForce Now gaming-on-demand cloud service.
Overall, the Shield GameStream service worked just about as we expected, with a few hiccups and pixelation artifacts that appeared every so often during gameplay.
But that was likely down to the wireless network we were testing on and that we were attempting to stream in 4K.
Things were smoother at 1080p.
Once we got Nvidia's on-demand GeForce Now service working,...
