Help me! (4K or not 4K)

[DainMK]

Black Friday is nearly upon us, and this year it coincides with pay-day, end of year bonus, Christmas bonus, and several people owing me money. So it's time to empty my bank account once again and plummet into poverty for the rest of the month.

The question is, what do I throw my money at this time?

I've been doing some research the last few days, and really cannot figure out whether I should invest in a 4K, or 2560 monitor.

Current specs in the rig:

                         i7 4790k

                         2x GTX 970's in SLi

                         16GB 2400MHz DDR3 RAM

                         Asus Maximus VII Ranger

                         A whole bunch of SSD space, and a few TB of hard space.

Obviously a single 970 would only really be useful in 4K for editing, but not gaming. Does the benefit of SLi give me the extra power I need to run 4K at a respectable level of detail?

So far I'm probably more inclined to invest in a high end 2560, 120Hz+, G-Sync monitor.

I know a lot of you are much more informed about these things than I, and would really appreciate any help I can get on making my decision.

Current contenders I have been looking at: Asus PB279Q 27" IPS UHD 60Hz 4K Monitor
                                                              Asus PG278Q 27" G-Sync 144Hz Monitor
                                                              ASUS PG279Q 27" G-Sync IPS 165Hz Monitor (This is probably my best uneducated choice)

Although those listed are what I have been looking at, any recommendations for good monitors will be considered, so long as I have a quality end result. £800 is my upper limit regarding budget.

Whatever I end up with will be used as my primary monitor, used for gaming, editing, general browsing etc. 

Thanks for reading, I really hope someone can make this easier for me to figure out!

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(For bonus points, or advanced tech's, this new monitor would put me up to 3 screens total. What kind of configuration should I be looking at as far as using all 3, or only 2, and which sockets I should be using to maximise graphical performance. See picture for details.)

 

[Wolf]

@Zeito

 

[Zeito]

My vote would be for the 165Hz Rog Swift screen, It's a better model of the 144Hz but either of them would be extremely good.

With regard to the multiple screens etc. You should run this screen via DisplayPort. Run the others via HDMI/DisplayPort/DVI.

It's worth mentioning for 4k/gaming across all 3 screens at once in high detail you should bear in mind the GTX970's memory 'bugs' due to the design of it's architecture. The 4GB memory pool of these cards is split into one section of 3.5GB which operates at the normal speed advertised by the card, and a secondary section of 0.5GB which is addressed a factor of 7 slower which in some cases is significant.

In games, the higher the resolution you're playing at, the more video memory is used by the graphics cards, particularly if your detail is turned up. In some games, this can push the cards memory usage over 3.5GB and the performance suddenly becomes massively crippled. This only happens in some seriously crazy highly detailed games in 4K or extremly high resolutions though. If you're just gaming on the 165Hz screen, and have other stuff open on the other screens, it should be fine. But I wouldn't want to push 970s in to 4k gaming.

 

[Anonymous Eagle]

Definitely display port for your main screen to take advantage of higher fps i use it for my 144hz monitor and HDMI for my second monitor  display port being the bottom connection if you didn't know (hdmi  is limited to 60hz there is hdmi2 that does the higher fps but i don't think it's nit massively popular as far as im aware) 

 

[DainMK]

Fantastic answer as always @Zeito, I really do appreciate it.

Glad I appear to have made the right choice. Now to cross my fingers and pray I can find some deal on it as the price tag will cripple me later. Anyway, who needs to eat when you have such a beautiful screen to emaciate in front of!

Also thanks @Dentibus, I have no idea what my cables are up to back there. Currently I'm using DVI's as you can see in the illustration. 

Before upgrading to windows 10 however I had one DVI in each GPU, running SLi with no problems. After the update however, the secondary screen only worked when switched to the same GPU as the primary? Confusing.. I should be able to run 3 screens (2 in GPU 1, 1 in GPU 2) while maintaining SLi, correct? At this point would it be worth offloading the PhysX to my CPU, or is the impact of PhysX negligable.

Sorry for all the questions, I'm a master when it comes to pharmaceuticals and biology, but pretty amateur when it comes to tech support.

 

[Zeito]

@Dentibus hits the nail on the head.

@DainMK When you are in the nvidia panel you can set up your nVidia display span and it will  take you through it with whatever screens it detects. You should be able to plug all 3 into one GPU i would think. The impact of PhysX shouldn't matter too much. It's worth keeping it on the GPU.

Your screen will probably come with a displayport cable

 

[DainMK]

....I'm an idiot. Forgetting the GPU has a million ports on it anyway. Whoops.

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[Fetty Wap]

So many numbers and letters thrown together im super confused  izzy: