That fancy 4K display you just bought is already obsolete. After teasing it at CES, Dell put its monstrous 32-inch, 8K monitor up for sale late Thursday for the whopping sum of $5,000.
At CES, Dell said the UP3218K monitor would start shipping on March 23, but in reality the display’s just available for preorders. The company is currently quoting April 17 as the ship date.
Dell’s 8K display offers four times as many pixels as a 4K monitor, packing 33.2 million of the tiny squares across its 7680 x 4320 resolution. (A 4K monitor, in turn, has four times as many pixels as a standard 1080p display.) The monitor also supports 100 percent AdobeRGB and 100 percent sRGB.
It looks amazing, but this beastly monitor requires an equally powerful PC to power it. If you watch PCWorld’s video on the Dell 8K from CES, you can see a full 4K video running in just one quarter of the display. (Four times the pixels, remember?) The back of the display holds two DisplayPort 1.4 ports, both of which have to be running to support the monitor’s output. Dell was using a high-end Nvidia Quadro workstation graphics card to power the display.
The impact on you at home: Requiring major hardware is to be expected since 8K is on the bleeding edge, but it points out a problem for technophiles drooling over the monitor. Namely, this is not a gamer-friendly display for now as it would likely choke on AAA titles even with a GTX 1080 Ti—Dell and Nvidia worked together closely on the display’s drivers.
Besides in 2017, $5,000 can be better spent on an entire 4K gaming rig rather than a single display. The good news is 8K displays will likely drop in price within a few years, and as they become more commonplace, AMD and Nvidia will no doubt produce consumer GPUs built with 8K in mind. For now, however, this monitor’s for pros only.