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The best 4K TV for gaming PCs
When you’re playing the best PC games, sometimes it can be tempting to just buy a huge gaming 4K TV to play your favorite titles in all their cinematic glory. And, we’re here to tell you that it’s ok to give in to that temptation. Don’t settle on a gaming monitor, splurge on one of the best 4K TVs for gaming. Just do yourself a favor: don’t sit too close, and don't worry too much about the response time.
There are some things you have consider before picking out the 4K TV that’s right for you, though. First, you need to consider size: you don’t want to pick up a giant 65-inch TV if you’re gaming in a small bedroom, but if you’re in a living room, picking up a 40-inch screen won’t do either. You have to balance the size of the room with your budget too, keep in mind that larger screens will cause the price of the TV to go up substantially.
And, while a 4K TV for gaming won’t have the same features as one of the best gaming monitors, unless you’re willing to spend $5,000, you can ensure that you don’t have an uncomfortable gaming experience. The most important spec you can aim here is response time. Anything under 6ms should give you a comfortable gaming experience, and as it goes above that number you may notice input lag – especially if you play a lot of eSports titles.
Below are the best 4K TVs for gaming PCs. We even included our price comparison tool, so you can be sure you’re getting the best deal deal today.
OLED technology has been transformed as a gaming display option over the past two years. The OLED class of 2017 finally started to tackle the technology’s previous brightness, noise and response time issues. And the 2018 series continued that journey in outstanding style, combining a whole new level of game friendliness with OLED’s traditional contrast prowess. While 2019's models will likely raise the bar again (we haven't had chance to test them yet), last year's TVs have already started to drop in price.
Being able to produce unbeatably deep, rich black colours like the OLED65E8 does also pays off handsomely with horror games or shooters set in dark locations—though you may have to nudge the brightness up a couple of notches to avoid losing some subtle shading detail in the darkest areas.
More good news with this year’s OLEDE8 series finds its Game Mode delivering much more brightness than last year’s seven generation models. Tests also show the OLEDE8 taking less than 20ms to render its images when you use its Game mode, which is an excellent result for a TV.
LG’s OLEDE8 models this year also support 120fps gaming (though only in HD, not 4K), and full 4:4:4 colour handling for total colour precision with PC game feeds.
One final handy trick of the OLEDE8 series is its ability to decode both the premium quality Dolby Vision HDR picture format (as used on a handful of PC games) and Dolby Atmos audio streams. Clearly this speaker system doesn’t have the power or full surround sound/height channel support you’d get with an external Atmos system, but there’s at least a more effective ‘wall of sound’ impression than typical TV sound systems provide.
Another thing to note is if you can live with a less glamorous design and reduced audio performance, LG’s cheaper C8 series give you pretty much the same picture quality.
While OLED is best for the inkiest of blacks, Samsung's QLED tech leads the way when it comes to vibrant colors and vivid contrasts. The Q9F is 2018's best 4K TV, and while it has now been replaced as the flagship model by the Q90R, it remains a showstopping panel. What's more, you can now pick it up for half the price, making this elite TV actually affordable, and it has almost all the features present in the newer (vastly more expensive) Q90R.
The headline feature is its HDR 2000 tech, which is the most vivid HDR of any commercially available TV. It's all very well boasting about it, but you can actually see a significant boost in vibrancy from every other TV set, with a noticeably bigger range of colors. 4K content looks stunning, but the TV also does a fantastic job of upscaling regular HD pictures and even SD content, making them more colorful and with smoother motion and edges. It's a fantastic all-rounder, thanks to direct full array LED picture display, and the anti-reflection screen is the icing on the cake.
What's more, the sound is very good too, which is unusual for TVs that place such an emphasis on soundbars and headsets. Having used external SONOS speakers for years, with other TVs, we finally found that the Q9F delivered superior audio. It's all finished off with a single-wire set-up, meaning you get no clutter behind the TV, and an ambient mode that lets you display art on the panel (or let it blend into your wall) when you're not using it. The only downside? The viewing angle is limited, so you get a loss in vibrancy if you're watching beyond 45 degrees which, with such a large TV that's designed to be the centerpiece of your room, is such a minor complaint. This is one of the best value TVs right now, and also one of the best you'll ever own.
Although Sony’s X900F LCD TV series came out in 2018, they’re very much still available. And handily, their relative age means they’re still available at massively reduced prices. In fact, if you snap one up now, you’re truly getting an upper mid-range big-brand TV for the price of an entry level one.
The key to their success is that despite their affordability, they use direct LED lighting with local dimming—like the Samsung Q8FN. There aren’t as many ‘dimming zones’ as you get with the Q8FN, but having this sort of backlight configuration at all is remarkable for such an affordable TV.
The result is a far better contrast performance than you can get from literally any other TV in its price class. And as we’ve highlighted throughout this article, a good contrast performance by a display is fundamentally important to an exciting HDR gaming picture.
Also great news for gamers is the X900F series’ Triluminos colour system. This uses proprietary Sony processing to produce a wider and more subtly nuanced colour performance than any other TV in its price class. This means 4K HDR game imagery looks more vibrant, rich and detailed.
Inevitably for its money, the X900F does not support the high frame rates of the LG OLEDE8 series, or the automatic game mode switching and variable refresh rate features of the Samsung Q8FNs. Also, because it uses far fewer dimming zones than the Samsung Q8FNs, you can sometimes see gentle halos of light around bright objects if they appear against dark backgrounds. This becomes exaggerated if you have to watch from an angle. The X900F series can only hit around half the brightness achieved by the Samsung LCD model, too.
The set does partner its still great pictures, though, with a respectably low 30ms of input lag if you use its game preset. And the bottom line is that no TVs as affordable as the X900Fs are going to be perfect. All that really matters here is that the X900F is comfortably the all-round best TV for gaming in its price range.
If you're looking to buy a 55" TV on a budget, look no further than the TCL 6-series. This is 2018's model, but that means you can often find it on sale but, quite frankly, it's a bargain at full price. While the earlier TCL models suffered from poor build quality, and several screen flaws, the 6-series solved these issues to deliver an ace Roku-powered TV. What's more, it's great for gaming too. While it doesn't have the low, low response rate of $1000+ panels, it manages between 6ms-12ms, which is above average for TVs of this size and price. What's more, it has full-array local dimming, which means the contrast ratios are good (the blacks, especially, are nice and deep).
Where the TCL suffers is in the color range, which is merely average for 4K TVs of this budget. While it has decent HDR, that can't quite mask the lower vibrancy of images, although (to be honest) you're unlikely to notice much of a difference unless you're playing the most colorful of games. At 55", it's less noticeable too, although if you're looking to go 65" you need to work out if you're ok getting a TV that does blacks and dark tones better than colors and light tones. For the price, however, it's very tough to fault the TCL 617. It even comes with voice control if you're into that sort of thing.
You can even drop down to 43" if you're looking for a 4K TV as part of a PC set-up / second room gaming rig. The contrast remains as impressive, and it's obviously a little cheaper too.
