4k monitor dilemma

[Darren Hagford]

So longish story but a short question.
I have an alienware laptop with a 970m and have been happy with about 2-4 hours of gaming a week on a 34" ultrawide (1080p).

At work I had a bad setup with a 900p 20" monitor and I was sick of it so I bought a sketchy 4k monitor off of ebay for 130 bucks that turned out actually being super sharp and nice but after an 8 hour day native 4k on a 28" drives my eyes nuts and I hate windows scaling so I swapped the 4k with the ultrawide.

now I am stuck with a 4k monitor at home that I cannot game on (but it would be really cool if I could) and I dont know what I should do... It is a new I7 Alienware so I could get a graphics amp so I am thinking about keeping the 4k and getting a graphics amp(ebay $130) and maybe a craigslist 980 ti ($250 in my area) so for $380 I could possibly game on 4k... or do I need something like a 1080, if that is the case then it may not be worth the money for 3 hours a week. I am also thinking of selling the 4k and getting another ultrawide 1080 ($250 refurb newegg)

my question is, is the 4k jump that great?

anyone have a graphics amp and a 4k display, what gpu what res?

If you were in my situation with a budget of 500 bucks what would you do?

 

[Chugalug_]

Don't bother, the CPU will bottleneck it.
If you want more gaming performance you're better off getting a new desktop rig.
Don't bother with a second ultrawide.

 

[Darren Hagford]

its a 6700hq I dont think it would bottleneck it too bad

 

[Chugalug_]

Even with a 6700HQ, it will bottleneck a desktop graphics card to a small extent, but it'll be perfectly fine.
My bad, I thought you mentioned the 6200u version.

 

[photonboy]

I'm CONFUSED by your post.

First, you couldn't stand using it at 4K due to DPI, so obviously you could use the monitor. Why then are you talking about an external, discrete GPU?

Was that a DIFFERENT computer with the 4K monitor?

If so, are you SURE you don't support 4K@60Hz from your laptop?

*ignoring all that even, you could always just output at 1080p@60Hz to the 4K monitor and have it scale to fit. No artifact issues as it's divisible scaling.

So..

In the question of what you should do in terms of GAMING, then just connect to it either at 4K, or at 1080p direct from the laptop then adjust the game settings to whatever is optimal.

You don't need an external GPU, and if you did for 4K@60Hz then again, just output at 1080p@60Hz instead.

 

[photonboy]

UPDATE:
Some older/crappy 4K monitors only support 30Hz at 4K regardless of what GPU you have.

 

[Darren Hagford]

Same laptop used @ work and home. Yes the monitor does 60 hz hdmi 2.0 and displayport 1.4 I think. When I say I could not use the 4k monitor I mentioned for a full day of work not gaming or movies (at home stuff) just saying I would use an external gpu on it because I would need some more power to game on it and 1080 looks sort of bad on a 28".

 

[photonboy]

Same laptop used @ work and home. Yes the monitor does 60 hz hdmi 2.0 and displayport 1.4 I think. When I say I could not use the 4k monitor I mentioned for a full day of work not gaming or movies (at home stuff) just saying I would use an external gpu on it because I would need some more power to game on it and 1080 looks sort of bad on a 28".

I would guess your laptop GPU is similar to a GTX960 desktop?

That's fine for a mixture of 2560x1440, and 1920x1080 for games. I played all my games until last year on a GTX680 2GB which is similar. Even Crysis 3 at 60FPS looked pretty good at the settings I chose.

Even if you COULD get an external GPU do you have a sufficient interface to the eGPU?

Have you investigated the performance loss you would get based on the bandwidth you have? High end cards might get throttled. (i.e. 4GBps)