few measure up to the value of this 280Hz gaming monitor as it punches way above its weight Japanese firm iiyama often acts as a herald for the budget segment marrying ever-higher refresh rates to more affordable price tags originally launching in October 2024 and lowering the barrier to entry for 280Hz by putting the 27in monitor below the £170 mark It feels like just yesterday I was praising the 100Hz G-Master G2755HSU-B1 for its £1.15 per frame but a strong blink and you’ll see it’s actually been well over a year iiyama has managed to crank the refresh rate up by 180% on a similar FHD resolution VA panel all while nearly doubling its value at a rather enticing £0.60 per hertz Club386 may earn an affiliate commission when you purchase products through links on our site.How we test and review products. AOC Gaming C27G4ZXE regularly undercuts it with swift discounts and Asus TUF Gaming VG279QM1A matches the price tag with a Fast IPS panel instead of VA You can’t count G-Master GB2795HSU out as the display has a few tricks up its sleeve to stand out from the crowd iiyama G-Master GB2795HSU makes a fantastic first impression with a design that punches above its price The flat screen hugs the thinnest of bezels wrapped in a matte black chassis built to a standard you’d expect from much more expensive models Its surprisingly slender approach emphasises the comparatively large 20mm chin but you’ll barely notice once you see it in action Much of this is possible because it borrows iiyama’s tried-and-tested design, as seen on more affordable G-Master G2755HSU-B1 all the way through to the premium ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 Where G-Master GB2795HSU differs is in its two-pronged stand fixing the stem to the base and monitor via two thumbscrews you will need to whip a screwdriver out if you intend to use the 100×100 VESA mount as you’ll first need to remove the backplate and you’ll benefit from a wide range of movement helping you keep the top bezel to its ergonomically-advised eye-level and pivot to a portrait setup left or right by 90° Cable management relies solely on a rear-mounted guide to keep your display and power cables neat You’ll use a regular kettle lead to keep the internal PSU fed while a single HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 provide visuals You’ll want to stick with the latter as only DisplayPort is capable of supporting the entire 280Hz refresh rate with HDMI 2.0 capping out at 240Hz No doubt part and parcel with keeping costs low I’d have liked a keyhole in the stand and underpass to route wires considering G-Master GB2795HSU features a robust USB hub but this is something even models twice the price often forgo I have plenty of praise for the Type-B upstream powering four Type-A downstream ports each rated at 5Gb/s owing to their 3.2 Gen 1 certification This is plenty of bandwidth to operate hungry peripherals like webcams and half of them rest on the side of the monitor for easy access there’s a 3.5mm audio out to connect headphones Much like all other built-in audio solutions it doesn’t compete with dedicated soundbars or studio monitors but is nice to have just in case but it’s important to temper expectations with any display in this regard the G-Master on-screen display (OSD) requires a bit of menu hopping Pressing the 4D joystick in reveals a quick selection littered with icons you need to decipher Some are more obvious than others depending on your familiarity but no matter which you click it inevitably guides you into a more robust menu with proper explanations anyway It begs the question why the initial menu is there in the first place rather than getting straight into the action There are shortcuts to avoid entering the menu by flicking the joystick in different directions left lets you switch I-Style Colour profiles and both up and down don’t do anything the joystick is responsive enough to make perusing otherwise painless I have high praise for the logical button placement especially siloing the power switch so you can’t accidently knock it First thing’s first; you’ll want to head into your Windows display settings to activate that blistering 280Hz refresh rate Only then can you bask in the impeccable smoothness G-Master GB2795HSU has to offer I’m already a big fan of how silky the cursor movements become but you won’t see the full effect until you boot a game It’s easy to see why iiyama bills this monitor for esports enthusiasts first and foremost, as you’re better off hitting the lofty ceiling in competitive games like Rainbow Six Siege and CS2. Using the highest settings in the latest triple-A offerings, on the other hand, proves more taxing on even the almighty Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition which manages 238fps in Assassin’s Creed Mirage at FHD there’s no reason you can’t simply bump the settings down in certain games to get the most out of your graphics card you just need to adjust your expectations accordingly there are plenty of classics out there that’ll race to the full allocation with nary a speedbump G-Master GB2795HSU is about more than just its refresh rate enticing gamers with a superb 0.2ms moving picture response time (MPRT) this metric outperforms most VA and IPS panels only outdone by the venerable OLED – exactly what you need for that competitive edge I believe 27in form factors make for the single most-balanced screens in any setup however it might be a touch large for a FHD model at just short of 82 PPI (pixels per inch) It’s the natural trade-off for a manageable refresh rate but comes with less clarity than a 24in or 1440p alternative it doesn’t bear thought when you’re dominating the enemy team in Marvel Rivals HDR10 is on hand to aid VA’s already wonderful contrast with inky blacks designed to immerse you in whichever world you’re trudging around in which is to be expected in this price range but I found it pleasantly surprising when spelunking in Avowed’s many dungeons all my benchmarks run using the stock settings There are three I-Style Colour options that don’t seem to change much at a glance alongside the ability to alter the warmth of your tones and save your own adjustments to a custom profile given G-Master GB2795HSU’s quality out the box VA panels tend not to have the widest gamut coverage Covering 84% of the AdobeRGB colour spectrum and 88% of DCI-P3 shows just how far the technology has come over the years showing perfectly capable performance for gaming and general viewing but you’ll want to turn your attention to IPS for intensive work such as colour grading as iiyama knocks colour accuracy out of the park G-Master GB2795HSU’s average 0.59 Delta-E far exceeds the 2.00 limit we set and 1.00 ideal by a considerable margin but this is solely due to a single outlier among the blues this VA panel glows with up to 309nits at its brightest That doesn’t hold a candle to the IPS displays we’ve tested over the years but it’s enough to combat the rays of sunshine in the morning without blinding you in the process Lows of 51nits leaves plenty to scale back if you’re gaming in the dark or switch Eco mode on to save power G-Master GB2795HSU offers as close to perfect black levels as possible without switching pixels off which is an astounding feat for a display with a panel-wide backlight Combined with the widest-ranging contrast ratio I’ve seen on a standard LED the only way to get better is to pay more than double the price for an OLED Colours spread evenly from end to end despite minor inconsistencies in the bottom-right but this sits comfortably away from our double-digit threshold with the bottom corners both fluctuating above a less-than-ideal 10% Use the display head-on and you’re not likely to notice but tighter viewing angles draw attention to it whenever you move from dead centre Keep in mind that even the slightest variable on the manufacturing line can change these results It always amazes me just how frugal iiyama monitors are G-Master GB2795HSU is the second-most efficient display to pass through our halls its peak power usage undercuts most minimums I do wonder just how much brighter the screen could get with more wattage under its belt but those kinds of ifs and buts tend to turn into a monkey’s paw Every panel type comes with its own concessions but iiyama G-Master GB2795HSU does a good job of making its VA monitor the best all-rounder it can possibly be Compromises still crop up in the form of luminance uniformity and relative detail through its lower PPI but it otherwise offers a truckload of value in a small £169 price tag Alongside fantastic contrast ratios and inky blacks that give premium OLEDs a run for their money the screen exceeds colour accuracy expectations Pair that with an ultra-low 0.2ms response time and you’ll stay in the action without any ghosting in sight there are cheaper alternatives out there that run mostly the same specs for £30 less let alone iiyama’s comprehensive four 5Gb/s ports making G-Master GB2795HSU one of the best high-refresh rate monitors on a budget Iiyama's latest ultrawide panel might be a 45-inch monster but it also offers plenty of precision and a very strong productivity feature set it's a true multitasking machine with loads of screen space to work with That makes it a touch more ergonomic in terms of desk space But it also improves the pixel density by a small but arguably critical quotient To that you can add VA panel technology with strong all-round specifications including 165Hz refresh and sub-1ms claimed response plus excellent connectivity including USB-C with 90W of power delivery and a KVM switch All told, this new Iiyama amounts to a single monitor with the desktop real estate of dual 1440p panels, plus good connectivity. It's a very appealing proposition for anyone who needs one of the best business monitors to multitask view several applications in parallel and generally have plenty of on-screen elbow room Iiyama doesn't traditionally go in for aesthetic theatrics and that's no different for the Iiyama ProLite XCB4594DQSN albeit with slim bezels on three sides that add a contemporary air it's nevertheless well-built and has all the features you'll likely want for a high-spec productivity monitor The stand offers a good array of adjustment plus a touch of pivot to help get the horizontal level just right though the lack of swivel is a disappointing omission it's good to have decent adjustability on a 45-inch panel like this where the sheer size alone makes for challenging ergonomics this is a curved panel but courtesy only of a relatively gentle 1500R arc a little more curve would arguably make viewing the furthest extremities a bit more comfortable you get USB-C with 90W of power delivery for effortless single-cable connectivity of a laptop Thus with the single cable you can not only drive the display and keep a laptop charged but also connect peripherals like keyboard enabling comprehensive connectivity through that single port you won't want to go back to that old rat's nest of cables The USB hub also allows for support for KVW switch capability so you can easily share this display and any connected peripherals across two PCs the rear of the display also includes a pair of HDMI ports and DisplayPort all of which support the full 5,120 by 1,440 resolution at 165Hz All these various connectivity features are harder to set up than need be Iiyama has chosen some suboptimal default settings which means you'll have to spend a fair amount of time in the unfriendly OSD menu just to get this monitor running at the right resolution and refresh over various inputs Once you've got everything configured correctly But Iiyama would do well to look again at the OSD and default settings We've seen plenty of 49-inch panels with the familiar if still spectacular 5,120 by 1,440 pixel native revolution The difference here is that the Iiyama ProLite XCB4594DQSN is a 45 incher That obviously makes it a touch smaller while still being a very expansive display It also bumps the pixel density up from 108 DPI to 118 DPI compared to those 49-inch panels But it's just enough to make a visible difference to the crispness and quality of fonts a 27-inch or even 32-inch 4K monitor has much better pixel density again But the increase to nearly 120DPI definitely helps and is particularly noticeable in MacOS which arguably benefits even more from the DPI bump than Windows this is a very nice example of the VA breed of LCD panel (Image credit: Iiyama)(Image credit: Iiyama)(Image credit: Iiyama)(Image credit: Iiyama)(Image credit: Iiyama)(Image credit: Iiyama)(Image credit: Iiyama)(Image credit: Iiyama)It's nicely calibrated albeit this isn't a panel aimed at content creation pros and doesn't offer pre-calibrated Adobe RGB or DCI-P3 modes far more money for an equivalent OLED monitor this panel will almost certainly be plenty quick enough for most users low latency and the 0.8ms response spec is impressive there is some noticeable overshoot with the response-accelerating overdrive feature set to one of its more aggressive modes but if you're sensitive to that kind of thing Iiyama likewise hasn't done a great job of calibrating SDR content in HDR mode you'll really need to jump between SDR and HDR modes depending on content types The Iiyama ProLite XCB4594DQSN doesn't do anything radical the large panel and ultrawide format makes for an extremely effective productivity tool it's an intriguing alternative to a pair of 1440p monitors The 45-inch as opposed to 49-inch diagonal also makes for slightly improved pixel density and font rendering That also applies to the comparison with more conventional 27-inch 1440p monitors This Iiyama is just that little bit crisper while still providing a huge canvas for multitasking with a slick 165Hz refresh and fairly speedy responses for a VA panel Factor in the 450 nit brightness and basic HDR support and this panel is well up for some multimedia and games on the side this is a genuine productivity powerhouse and the only obvious snags are a slightly frustrating OSD menu and some poorly chosen default settings none of which are enough to spoil what is otherwise a strong overall package For more pin-sharp displays, we tested the best monitors for MacBook Pro Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall meet. Which is handy, because Jeremy (Twitter) is addicted to both former editor of iCar magazine and incumbent car guru for T3 magazine Jeremy reckons in-car technology is about to go thermonuclear But rather an explosive period of unprecedented innovation with claims that Valve is now playtesting a new build and could go on to announce and release the game later this year It is also being speculated that the game could open up a Valve multiverse potentially making an appearance in the new Half-Life game View Results Gaming monitor refresh rates have become higher over the last few years But one monitor has now been pushed all the way to 700Hz What's even more surprising is that it's a CRT beast from more than two decades ago If you want the highest refresh rate gaming monitor on the market right now, then the e-sports-focused Asus ROG Swift Pro PG248QP with its 540Hz TN (or Esports TN) panel is one choice. The other is the Zowie XL2586X YouTube channel RetroGamingBase has shown that there is another monitor that can exceed that refresh rate able to reach an incredible 700Hz: a used IIyama Vision Master Pro 512 CRT Using the custom resolution feature in the Nvidia Control Panel the retro channel had already got the Vision Master Pro all the way to 500Hz in another video (below) The caveat was that the only way it could achieve this was by dropping the resolution down to 300 x 200 resulting in a letterbox window that actually cuts the "Hz" part off the text This required reducing the resolution to a tiny 320 x 120 to prevent the monitor from exceeding its kilohertz specification and causing an unstable refresh rate They didn't push it any higher in case the monitor was damaged RetroGamingBase said the Vision Master Pro the channel uses is in like-new condition so the tests are quick and only carried out to confirm the refresh rate settings work potentially damaging tests and to see if gaming is possible The Vision Master Pro has a 22-inch screen which is one of the areas where today's monitors have CRTs beat For some modern monitors, check out our updated The Best PC Monitors feature TechSpot is a registered trademark and may not be used by third parties without express written permission TechSpot is represented by Future PLC. Learn about advertising opportunities an old timer pushed to within an inch of its life Are you looking for the fastest monitor money can buy with a refresh rate that dwarfs all others technically you should be hunting for a used IIyama Vision Master Pro 512 as this YouTube channel has just forced the old CRT beast to a frankly astonishing 700 Hz That display does manage a full 1080p resolution whereas the poor IIyama was cranked down to 320 x 200 in order to achieve the effect After a successful test of 600 Hz at 150p resolution (in which the monitor refused to display its actual refresh rate on the built-in interface) the Vision Pro was then run at 700 Hz at a magnificently letterboxed 320 x 120 resolution.  showing a hugely cut down confirmation window with the settings mostly obscured RetroGamingBase decided to call it quits before potentially damaging the monitor itself CRT monitors in good condition are increasingly hard to find so now the hunt is on to find a model that's not in such good shape for some actual gaming testing That's if Windows 11 will display correctly at such a low resolution a notion which the channel expresses some doubt towards it turns out the old CRT really can beat the fresh-faced newcomers in terms of raw refresh rate performance even if you do end up reduced to looking at your programs through a tiny fraction of the available screen space a built-in four port USB hub (luxury!) and a stated weight of 65 lbs Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals I know I'm far from the only one that remembers heaving CRT monitors into the back of a car to take to that much missed event Little did we know that all these years later it'd be these big clunkers throwing out refresh rates that makes even the most modern monitors look slow on their feet Andy EdserHardware WriterAndy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12 when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't—and he hasn't stopped since Now working as a hardware writer for PC Gamer Andy's been jumping around the world attending product launches and trade shows all the while reviewing every bit of PC hardware he can get his hands on if it's interesting hardware he'll write words about it This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page When you’re looking for a great monitor for gaming, or even just a great monitor in general, price is always a factor. iiyama’s G-Master series is here to provide premium gaming features for a fraction of the price of other monitors with their Red Eagle line-up. The 23.8-inch monitor is built for those who may be short on space, but who want to upgrade their set-up nonetheless. It is well-suited to console gamers wanting something a little fancier to game on than an old TV, and is especially well-suited to modern-generation consoles that support higher frame rates. With all that being said, it’s time to jump into the review of the monitor, and breaking down why it’s so good for the price. 4.5What's the Best/Olivia Sheed Rrp: £204.96 plug and play straight wayIncluded ports and USB hub very handy for condensing setupConsConfiguring the screen isn't easy with the buttons includedScreen4.0Performance5.0Build4.5Value5.0Resolution1080p Full HDScreen size23.8-inchScreen typeIPSRefresh rate165HzResponse time0.8msHDRNoPorts2x USB 1x power socketColour support24 bits per pixelBrightness250 nitsViewing angleHorizontal/Vertical: 178° with many people who use them choosing to mount them to the back of their monitor to save space The power cord was a little on the chunkier side and occasionally made it difficult to try and cable manage for such a compact monitor I was hoping for something similarly compact all the settings I needed were available to me on the side you're able to configure settings such as brightness and even adjust black levels in the colour settings which helps those who may want specific colour settings for visuals or grading that they’d want to aim for capable of replicating just over 16 million colours and will absolutely serve any game you throw at it and make the colours pop One caveat is the buttons at the back to navigate menus I was able to finally modify the colour to my liking even setting user profiles if you'd want different settings across consoles/games You can also enable and disable settings such as AMD FreeSync and even remove the opening logo on start-up The size of the screen makes it well suited to smaller setups such as in a university dorm or even if you're trying to build a gaming cave but all the space you have is the cupboard under the stairs The included stand comes with a clip to help with cable management and keeping your setup nice and clean the Red Eagle range goes all the way up to 27-inches as well as offering other configurations in their other models So if you like what's being said here but think the 23.8 might be a touch too small you've got plenty of other options without breaking the bank An unexpected feature was the dual speakers in the monitor again saving space on your desk by having them built in If you're not fussy about acoustics and just need something to project audio as you're gaming All I'd say is not to expect too much of them and treat them as a fun bonus rather than a main feature of the monitor High FPS 1080p gaming is one of the most common ways PC gamers like to experience their games , and this monitor is a surefire way to cover that demographic. 4K gaming is reserved for those with more of a budget, so if you’re just getting into PC gaming, this is a good way to get your foot in the door. The iiyama works hard to cement itself as a great entry/budget level monitor, though that doesn’t mean all the features are bog-standard. Featuring AMD FreeSync, this means that the likelihood of “screen tearing” while gaming is greatly reduced. This is a nice bonus to see from such a budget monitor, and nice to see premium gaming features aren't being denied to smaller brands like iiyama. There aren't many criticisms I have of this monitor, it's worked great for me for a number of weeks now, though there were one or two things. As mentioned earlier, the included speakers are an unexpected bonus, but don't expect to do any high-fidelity listening out of them. The dual 2W speakers land in the "serviceable for a podcast" section of speaker quality, but if I were to nail down the sound exactly, they're tinny, quiet and quite distorted whenever you try to listen at a higher volume. Don't expect too much from them. Onto my last grumble: the menu and buttons. Many monitors use a joystick-style button which I think works more intuitively than having five identical feeling buttons on the back of a monitor while looking at the front of the monitor trying to figure out what each of them does. The odds are you'd probably only need to sort your settings once or twice in the lifespan of the monitor, but getting there in the first place is a painful experience. These are the only two main annoyances I picked out, and both can be excused by the amazing price. Despite personal gripes with menus and speakers, to expect absolute perfection at this price point is asking a bit much. Aligning expectations with the budget isn't accepting mediocrity, if the monitor cost £300 then I'd have a much stronger opinion however. Looking on Amazon, there are a lot of monitors from more obscure brands that cost around the same, the cheapest I've seen is £99. What sets iiyama apart is the sheer number of positive reviews it's garnered. It's closest competition averages 500 reviews and about 4.5 stars, whereas iiyama has managed to achieve that same rating with nearly 10,000 reviews. As for budget and buying this monitor, while suited for someone who is budget conscious, this monitor is high quality enough to stretch to many high-end setups, though the resolution may be the dealbreaker later on. While 1080p is a little underwhelming in the current market, it’s definitely the highest a budget monitor will stretch to when it comes to gaming spec. 1x power socketColour support16.7 million colour capablilty 24 bit-depthBrightness250 nitsViewing angleHorizontal/Vertical: 178° Offering the same resolution and frame rate if you're after something a little flashier The included stand is ergonomically adjustable saving you from having to buy one yourself if you're wanting to avoid neck strain it stacks up pretty well next to the Red Eagle even if the panel is only a VA and not IPS 4.5Performance5.0Build4.0Value4.0Resolution1080p Full HDScreen size24-inchScreen typeVARefresh rate165HzResponse time1msHDRNoPorts1x headphone jack The offering from well-known monitor magnate BenQ will definitely meet your needs when it comes to gaming but with included speakers and a bezel-less display Though there is a little extra "chonk" at the back and gives you a great high FPS HD gameplay expereince 4.0Performance4.5Build4.5Value5.0Resolution1080p Full HDScreen size23.8-inchScreen typeVARefresh rate165HzResponse time1msHDRHDR10Ports1x HDMI A return to IPS for the recommended alternatives Coming with all the features you'd want to see One downside is that while the iiyama offering keeps to a full-black design able to be used in an office or gaming station the AOC goes all in with red streaks that wouldn't blend in well outside of a League of Legends tournament Keep that in mind when considering where the monitor is likely to be seen but otherwise this is the best alternative out there Olivia Sheed is a tech writer for What’s the Best she takes a keen interest in the tech industry and how they can meet the growing demands of AAA games high FPS gaming is something she is very familiar with While she likes to dip into several fixations at once she is especially well-versed in mechanical keyboards and speakers It was tested over the course of a few weeks both as a workstation monitor and gaming monitor watching videos with the integrated speakers and testing the output through HDMI and DisplayPort ranging from FPS shooters like Apex Legends to the computationally demanding Cyberpunk 2077 All scenarios were running at max 1080p resolution displaying fast and accurate picture in all gaming scenarios we cut through the jargon with down-to-earth product evaluations Our team of experienced reviewers puts everyday gadgets to the test We don't waste time on unrealistic scenarios; instead we focus on real-world performance that matters to consumers This means unbiased buying advice you can trust We only review products that are significant and relevant so you can be sure you're getting the latest insights Haven't seen a review for what you're looking for we're constantly adding new products to our growing catalogue For in-depth details on our testing process, visit our dedicated tech and electronics how we test page Olivia Sheed is a Tech Writer and Reviewer at What’s The Best how-to guides and articles across all things technology Her interests align with “anything nerdy.” Olivia is an avid fan of TTRPGs campy classics such as those from Hammer Film Productions in the 70s are her favourite for a comfy watch Subscribe to the What’s The Best  Newsletter to keep up to date with more of the latest reviews and recommendations from the rest of the What’s The Best team Company number 01176085; Bauer Radio Limited Company number: 1394141; Registered office: Media House Peterborough PE2 6EA and H Bauer Publishing Company number: LP003328; Registered office: The Lantern H Bauer Publishing are authorised and regulated for credit broking by the FCA (Ref No: 845898) Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon We help you navigate a myriad of possibilities Sign up for our newsletter for the best of the city By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. Tokyo a magical restaurant made up of more than 20 pop-up igloos You’ll find the restaurant nestled in the snowy Japanese Alps in the small town of Iiyama in Nagano prefecture the restaurant will be running from January 24 to February 25.  【レストランかまくら村2025⛄】＠長野県飯山市◆開催日：2025/1/24～2/28◆予約受付日（各日10:00開始）・飯山旅々。宿泊プラン　2024/11/1（詳細は順次掲載）・日帰り各種プラン　Web先行申込 2024/12/20　電話受付　2025/1/16詳しくはHPへ☟https://t.co/46sXqsobAx pic.twitter.com/kFIpe9tNes Each igloo fits up to four people and you'll be treated to a hearty meal featuring the local delicacy noroshi nabe You can choose to dine for lunch or dinner or opt for a shorter snack plan where you can enjoy a warm cup of amazake (sweet sake) or soup inside the cosy little igloos Be sure to visit the igloo behind a small red torii gate – inside you’ll find a frosty Shinto shrine. The grounds around the restaurant are also great for sledding, or you could pop in for a visit during a ski trip to one of the surrounding snow resorts.  Lunch at Kamakura Village costs ¥6,000 per person (¥4,500 for children) while dinner is ¥7,000 (¥4,900 for children) and includes noroshi nabe onigiri rice balls and private use of an igloo A snack plan is also available for ¥2,300 (¥1,700 for children) and includes private igloo use and a small snack.  You can get to Restaurant Kamakura Village in about two hours from Tokyo Station by taking the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Iiyama Station and then an express bus. For more information on the restaurant and to make a reservation, visit the website This article was published on February 15 2021 and updated on November 20 2024 The best times to see autumn leaves in Japan this year, according to official forecast Shibuya to cancel 2025 New Year’s Eve countdown celebrations Universal Studios Japan’s new Donkey Kong attraction opens next month You can now get Akita inu and Hachiko marshmallows in Tokyo Shibuya Sky is celebrating Christmas with mirror balls and rooftop light shows Want to be the first to know what’s cool in Tokyo? Sign up to our newsletter for the latest updates from Tokyo and Japan. facebooktwitterpinterestinstagramAbout us is preparing to launch its inaugural whisky next year and is offering casks for sale through Dekantā Kiyokawa was founded in 2019 by David Troiano but is relatively unknown outside of its home country The brand is preparing to launch its first whisky next year from its Iiyama Mountain Farm Distillery The company said the idea of creating whisky directly from farm to bottle is difficult to achieve in Japan as barley farming is not widespread and the climate of heavy snowfall and hot summers provides a challenge the distillery managed to grow mountain barley with the help of a local scientist after many failed attempts they created a crossbreed of barley that could withstand the area’s extreme conditions while holding the ‘ideal characteristics’ for whisky production the barley lies under up to three metres of snow with its golden colour returning once the snow has melted The distillery has also installed two 5,000-litre pot stills that were imported from Italy Kiyokawa is producing whisky matured in both Marsala casks The Marsala whisky (62% ABV) offers a ‘warm and sweet’ palate with notes of peach and apricot black cherries and chocolate can be found in the ‘rich and complex’ oloroso cask The distillery is also aiming to achieve an industry first in Japan by maturing its whisky in a Bourbon barrel that was seasoned with orange liqueur Kiyokawa is also building a traditional Japanese washi paper production workshop to enable the brand to design its own label at the distillery “We like to think we have been as persistent as our barley when producing a quality liquid that best reflects Japan’s terroir and spirit,” said Troiano A limited number of single malt whisky casks are available to purchase through retailer Dekantā Cask purchases come with opportunities to sample the liquid and create an independent bottling of Kiyokawa single malt whisky once the ageing requirements have been met There will also be limited edition releases available from Dekantā in the future Last year, we spoke to the founder of Karuizawa Whisky Company on his plans to recreate the revered Japanese brand We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website. 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Volume 3 - 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2020.598927 This article is part of the Research TopicHeterogeneous Computing for AI and Big Data in High Energy PhysicsView all 6 articles Graph neural networks have been shown to achieve excellent performance for several crucial tasks in particle physics An important domain for the application of these networks is the FGPA-based first layer of real-time data filtering at the CERN Large Hadron Collider which has strict latency and resource constraints We discuss how to design distance-weighted graph networks that can be executed with a latency of less than one μs on an FPGA we consider a representative task associated to particle reconstruction and identification in a next-generation calorimeter operating at a particle collider We use a graph network architecture developed for such purposes and apply additional simplifications to match the computing constraints of Level-1 trigger systems we convert the compressed models into firmware to be implemented on an FPGA Performance of the synthesized models is presented both in terms of inference accuracy and resource usage high-energy physics (HEP) experiments collect signals generated by the particles produced in high-energy proton collisions that occur every 25 ns The readout from the detectors that capture the particles emerging from the collision is filtered by a real-time processing system that discards uninteresting collision events The trigger system is structured in two stages: a Level-1 trigger (L1T) implemented with custom electronics on-detector and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs); and a high-level trigger (HLT) possibly including co-processor accelerators like graphics processing units (GPUs) and FPGAs Because of asynchronous event processing at the HLT the accept/reject decision has to be reached with a typical latency of O(100) ms a decision must be taken within a fixed latency of O(1) μs “hard-deadline” nature of the processing system and the limited size of the memory buffer for the data from each beam crossing a library designed to facilitate the deployment of ML algorithms on FPGAs While the hls4ml applications go beyond HEP its development has been driven by the LHC L1T use case while the irregular geometry of a typical HEP detector complicates the use of computing vision techniques such as convolutional neural networks GNNs can naturally deal with the sparse and irregular nature of HEP data In this work, we show how a graph model can be efficiently deployed on FPGAs to perform inference within O(1) μs for HEP-related problems. We consider the distance-weighted architecture GarNet, introduced in Qasim et al., (2019b) which is designed to keep resource consumption under control by reducing as much as possible the number of operations It has been demonstrated to perform well for a HEP-related task namely particle reconstruction in a calorimeter it represents a good candidate for our purpose The firmware implementation of GarNet presented in this work has been included in hls4ml representing the first graph-based algorithm available in the library We present a case study of a neural network algorithm based on GarNet applied to a task of identifying the nature of an incoming particle and simultaneously estimating its energy from the energy deposition patterns in a simulated imaging calorimeter The inference accuracy of the firmware implementation of the algorithm is compared against its offline counterpart running on processors (CPUs and GPUs) Latency and resource utilization of the translated FPGA firmware are reported along with a discussion on their implications for real-world usage of similar algorithms Section 3 defines the main problem by outlining the challenges in designing a graph network compatible with L1T latency and resource constraints Section 4 describes how GarNet addresses these challenges and introduces a simplified form of the algorithm with a better affinity to a firmware implementation The case study using a calorimeter simulation is presented in Section 5 with detailed descriptions of the task setup and the summary of FPGA firmware synthesis GNN models had not yet been supported by hls4ml the present work is the first demonstration of GNN inference on FPGAs for a HEP application While these frameworks are applicable to various graph processing tasks they require the user to specify the design in highly specific nonstandard format rather than a standard serialized ML model as in our implementation architectures that consist of repeatable graph-to-graph mapping blocks (GN blocks) Each GN block performs some combination of operations such as edge feature transformation aggregation of neighbors’ features at each vertex global aggregation of edge and vertex features where the cardinality of υ may differ sample to sample which may be anything from a global scalar such as a classification label of the sample To be usable as a part of an LHC L1T system an algorithm must execute within O(1) μs and have the throughput to accept all inputs from each beam crossing every 25 ns whereby N copies of the algorithm accept inputs from N different beam crossings may be used to decrease the throughput requirement by a factor of N there is a practical constraint that the firmware implementation should fit in the FPGA resources of the system utilize the resources such as digital signal processing units (DSPs) and block RAM (BRAM) within the limits of chips available on the market Satisfying these requirements with a GNN can be challenging for multiple reasons listed below • Model depth: Within each GN block vertices exchange information with other directly connected vertices or with global attributes to expand the receptive field of each vertex beyond the nearest neighbors multiple GN blocks must be repeated in the network Given that various transformations within each GN block are often themselves multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) Deep networks go against the latency requirement as each perceptron layer uses at least one clock cycle on an FPGA under a straightforward implementation and also against the resource usage requirement because MLPs utilize multiplications heavily for problems where the application of GNNs is interesting the cardinality of υ is at least O(102) Even with the high degree of parallelism of FPGAs such large input will have to be processed serially to a certain extent increasing the latency and the interval before a new input can be accepted Longer IIs lead to lower throughput values • Memory usage: Related to the problem of the input size if the algorithm requires temporary retention of features for all vertices or edges memory usage may be prohibitive for an FPGA firmware implementation The exceptions include when ℰ is trivial (ℰ=∅ or when the graph is complete) and when all samples have an identical graph topology the memory access pattern of the algorithm is known at compile time and therefore can be statically scheduled in the FPGA firmware The attention mechanism suppresses information from vertices that are considered unimportant effectively forming “soft” edges among the unsuppressed vertices we study a GNN architecture with these exact properties then discuss the modifications to the architecture to make it suitable for an FPGA firmware implementation In this work, we consider GarNet (Qasim et al., 2019b) as a specific example of GNN A GarNet layer is a GN block that takes as input a set of V vertices and returns the same set of vertices with Fout features Fin features of each vertex are encoded into an internal representation and gathered at S aggregators A distance parameter between each of the aggregators and vertices is also computed from the vertex attributes Information gathered at the aggregators are then sent back to individual vertices and decoded into Fout features Communications between the vertices and aggregators are weighted by a decreasing function of the distance parameter implementing an attention mechanism that allows the network to learn a dynamic nontrivial graph structure from the vertex input alone The original GarNet algorithm, while already using less compute and memory resource than other similar GNN architectures in Qasim et al., (2019b) and Wang et al., (2019) is still challenging to implement as fast and high-throughput FPGA firmware The biggest problem arises from the use of the input feature vector as a part of the input to the decoder which requires retention of the input data until the last steps of the algorithm An immediate consequence of this requirement is a longer II because processing of new samples cannot start while the input data for the current sample is still in use the input feature vector is already used to compute the distance parameter as well as the internal representation of each vertex and therefore a reuse of the input in the decoder creates a complex data flow restricting the options for pipelining the algorithm We therefore designed a modified GarNet algorithm with a simplified processing flow: The encoder and distance calculator networks are both single-layer perceptrons with linear activation functions so one can write them as linear transformations where (wji,bi) and (αaj,βa) are the kernels and biases of the encoder and distance calculator networks • Aggregation (Figure 1C): The learned representation vectors fvi of the vertices are weighted by a potential function Wav=exp(−dav2) and averaged across the vertices the ith averaged feature hai of aggregator a is written as The factor Vmax in the denominator is the maximum possible value for the vertex multiplicity V (as V may have a different value for each input sample) Through this normalization by a common factor the information about the size of the sample (cardinality of υ) is effectively encoded into hai • Output transformation (Figures 1D,E): The aggregated features are sent back to the vertices using the same weights as and then transformed by a single-layer decoder network with linear activation function into the final output representation gv′k(k=1,…,Fout) With the kernel u and bias c of the decoder This simplified algorithm differs from the original design in the following ways only the mean over vertices is computed at the aggregators whereas the maximum is also used in the original design the aggregators in the original design have the input feature vector is not used as a part of the input to the decoder network with additional sets of kernel weights u′ and w′ the original design applies a nonlinear (tanh) activation function to the decoder while the simplified version uses a linear activation In the specific case considered in the next section these simplifications result in negligible degradation of the network performance this simplified version of the algorithm is referred to as GarNet Processing flow of the modified GarNet algorithm: (A) The input features (gvj) of each vertex are processed by a linear network that returns a new set of features (fvi) and its distance from the S aggregators (dav) (C) A message is gathered by each aggregator as a weighted sum across the vertices of fvi with Wav=exp(−dav2) as weights (D) A message from each aggregator (f˜avi) is passed back to each vertex (E) The aggregated outputs of each vertex are given as input to a neural network It is worth pointing out that while the GarNet layer uses only linear activation functions for all of the internal neural networks it can still learn nonlinear functions through the nonlinearity of the potential function Wav having no nonlinear activation functions allows a compact FPGA firmware implementation of the layer consisting mostly of multiplications and additions The only substantial computation comes with the exponential function whose values can be pre-computed with sufficient granularity and stored An FPGA firmware implementation of the GarNet layer using Vivado (O’Loughlin et al., 2014) HLS is integrated into the hls4ml library The HLS source code is written in C++ and is provided as a template from which an HLS function for a GarNet layer can be instantiated specifying the configurable parameters such as S we provide some noteworthy details of the implementation all quantities appearing in the computation are expressed as either integers or fixed-point numbers with fractional precision of at least eight bits the distance parameter dav is represented with three integer bits dav is reinterpreted as a 12-bit unsigned integer which is used to retrieve the corresponding pre-computed value of Wav from a table with 4,096 entries The processing flow in Eqs 1–5 is compactified in the hls4ml implementation by exploiting the linearity of the encoder, average aggregation, and the decoder. Equations 1, 3, and 5 can be combined into the kernel and bias tensors of the encoder and decoder are contracted into w˜ and b˜ at logic synthesis time resulting in fewer steps to arrive at the output from the input the input data from each sample are encoded into Wav a new sample can be processed as soon as the three quantities from the previous sample are computed the II of the overall GarNet layer depends on the number of clock cycles needed to compute the three quantities Gaj and La can be derived trivially from Wav making the latency of the computation of the latter the critical determinant of the throughput of the algorithm The computation of Wav is performed independently on each vertex and is therefore parallelizable across the vertices there would be Vmax logic units (one unit per vertex) operated simultaneously with V typically as large as O(102) or greater this configuration would consume too much of the FPGA resources and would not fit on a single chip the hls4ml implementation of GarNet allows a partial parallelization of the algorithm controlled by a parameter called the reuse factor (Rreuse) the logic unit to compute Wav is cloned Vmax/Rreuse times such that each unit is reused serially up to Rreuse times This serial reuse is fully pipelined with the local II of one clock cycle The latency TW for computing Wav for all vertices is therefore given by where TW0∼20 is the number of clock cycles needed to compute Wav for one vertex The value of TW0 depends on the numerical precision of the fixed-point numbers in the computation Finally, the kernel and bias of the encoder and the kernel of the decoder can be quantized, such that each element takes only values −1, 0, or 1 (ternary quantization) (Zhu et al., 2017) contracted kernel and bias w˜ and b˜ have elements that are O(1) integers Multiplication of small integers with fixed-point numbers can be performed in FPGAs using LUTs rather than DSPs which are usually the more scarce resource Multiplications with LUTs also proceed faster than those with DSPs the hls4ml implementation of GarNet is applied to a representative task for the LHC L1T namely reconstructing electrons and pions in a simulated 3D imaging calorimeter we first describe the dataset used for the study then define the task and the architectures of the ML models and present the inference performance of the models and the resource usage of the synthesized firmware The calorimeter is a multi-layered full-absorption detector with a geometry similar to the one described in Qasim et al., (2019b) which is considered as both an absorber and a sensitive material and no noise or threshold effects in the readout electronics are simulated While this homogeneous calorimeter design is not a faithful representation of a modern sampling calorimeter this simplification allows us to evaluate the performance of the ML models decoupled from detector effects Schematics of the high-granularity and low-granularity regions of the (A) electromagnetic and (B) hadron layers The momentum direction and the window of origin of the pileup particles are the same as the primary particle The momentum value of the pileup particles is sampled from a Landau distribution with μ=0.6 GeV and c=0.5 GeV The output of the simulation for each event is the array of total energy deposition values by the particles at individual detector cells (hits) Energy depositions by the particles in the homogeneous calorimeter are recorded exactly the detector output does not require calibration and is not affected by stochastic noise The hits in the figure are colored by the fraction of the hit energy due to the primary particle (primary fraction Values in parentheses in the graph titles are the respective energy depositions contained in the cluster around the seed hit with their coordinates at the center of the corresponding detector cells and the size of the markers proportional to the square root of the hit energy the point color scale from blue to red corresponds to the primary fraction (see Section 5.1 for definition) the color scale from blue to green corresponds to ΔEpred/Δh which is an indication of the importance the neural network model places to individual hits for energy regression because of the distortion of the energy deposition pattern in the cluster due to pileup particle identification based on collective properties of the hits such as the depth of the energy center of mass only half of the pion events have 95% of the energy deposition from the pion contained in the cluster requiring substantial extrapolation in the energy prediction This task is thus both practically relevant and sufficiently nontrivial as a test bench of a GarNet-based ML model Data flow is split into two branches in the final step The first branch consists of a fully connected layer with a single node whose output is activated by a sigmoid function and is interpreted as the classification prediction the predicted probability that the primary particle is an electron The other branch also consists of a single-node fully connected layer but with a linear activation of the output which is interpreted as the predicted value of the energy of the particle This model is built in Keras (Keras, 2015), using the corresponding implementation of GarNet available in Qasim et al., (2019a). In total, the model has 3,402 trainable parameters (2,976 in the three GarNet layers), whose values are optimized through a supervised training process using the Adam optimizer (Kingma and Ba, 2014) Input is processed in batches of 64 samples during training The overall objective function that is minimized in the training is a weighted sum of objective functions for the classification and regression tasks: The objective function for classification ℒclass is the binary cross entropy in each batch between the truth labels (electrons are represented by 1 and pions by 0) and the classification output of the model The objective function for regression ℒreg is the batch mean of the relative squared error where Epred and Etrue are the predicted and true energies of the primary particle The training is performed on 400,000 training and 100,000 validation samples over a few hundred epochs with early stopping when the value of the objective function does not improve for ten consecutive epochs Keeping the full training dataset on RAM and using two NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs in parallel each epoch takes roughly 30 s to process this model is referred to as the quantized model and the original model as the continuous model The quantized model is trained with the same objective function and training hyperparameters as the continuous model To evaluate the inference performance of the trained models reference algorithms are defined separately for the classification and regression subtasks The reference algorithm for classification (cut-based classification) computes the energy-weighted mean z¯ and standard deviation σz of the z coordinates of the hits where i is the index of hits in the cluster and zi and hi are the z coordinate and energy of the ith hit The cluster is labeled as an electron if z¯<z¯cut and σz<σzcut where z¯cut and σzcut are predefined thresholds tend to penetrate deeper in an absorbing detector and create showers of secondary particles with a larger transverse size than electrons and photons the reference algorithm (weight-based regression) predicts the energy of the primary particle through a formula where l(i) is the detector z layer of hit i Parameters {wl,bl}(l=1,…,50) are determined by minimizing ℒreg over the training dataset using Epredref as the predicted energy Particle identification based on the energy deposition profile of the cluster and energy estimation based on weighted sum of hit energies are both common strategies in the conventional non-ML-based event reconstruction approaches Performance of the trained continuous and quantized models, evaluated using the validation sample, are shown in Figure 4 the inference results based on the original Keras model and the HLS model The HLS model provides a realistic emulation of the synthesized FPGA firmware Classification (A) and regression (B) inference performance of the continuous and quantized GarNet-based models and the reference algorithms Results from the Keras and HLS implementations are shown for the GarNet-based models The classification performance is quantified with a ROC curve of electron identification efficiency vs The inset in (A) shows a close-up view of the efficiency range 0.90–0.96 for both axes The regression performance is quantified as the response (Epred/Etrue) in 10 GeV bins of Etrue The horizontal line in the box corresponds to the median of the distribution the top and bottom of the box to the upper and lower quartiles and the upper and lower ends of the whiskers to the 95th and 5th percentiles The classification performance is given in terms of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves that trace the electron identification efficiency (true positive fraction) and pion rejection efficiency (true negative fraction) for different thresholds of the classifiers The two GarNet-based models perform similarly and better than the cut-based reference in terms of the electron identification efficiency for a given pion rejection efficiency A detailed comparison of the four sets of results from the GarNet-based models in the inset reveals that the continuous model performs slightly better than the quantized model and that the difference between the Keras and HLS implementations is smaller for the quantized model The regression performance is given in terms of the response (Epred/Etrue) Distributions of the response are summarized in 10 GeV bins of Etrue the horizontal line in the box corresponds to the median of the distribution The GarNet-based models exhibit narrower spreads of the response distributions in most of the bins with the continuous model again performing slightly better than the quantized model The differences between the Keras and HLS implementations are due to the numerical precision in the computation While the former represents all fractional numbers in 32-bit floating-point numbers the latter employs fixed-point numbers with bit widths of at most 18 where the encoder and decoder of the GarNet layers employ integer weights for inference the difference between the two implementations are smaller For both subtasks, the GarNet-based models generally outperform the reference algorithms. The reference algorithm has narrower spread of the response in some energy bins for the regression subtask. However, it is important to note that the weights and biases appearing in Eq. 14 are optimized for a specific pileup profile while in a real particle collider environment pileup flux changes dynamically even on the timescale of a few hours algorithms based on inference of properties of individual hits such as the GarNet-based models presented in this study are expected to be able to identify hits due to pileup even under different pileup environments and thus to have a stable inference performance with respect to change in pileup flux Since a detailed evaluation of application-specific performance of GarNet is not within the scope of this work we leave this and other possible improvements to the model architecture and training to future studies each hit in the cluster is colored by the ratio of the change of predicted particle energy and the amount of perturbation (ΔEpred/Δh) While some hits with fprim=0 appear with ΔEpred/Δh>0 a general correspondence between fprim and ΔEpred/Δh is observed The occurrence of ΔEpred/Δh>1 is expected given the extrapolation required to predict the full particle energy from the energy of the hits included in the cluster we are able to probe how the GarNet-based model is learning the structure of the graph The latency, II, and resource usage of the FPGA firmware synthesized from the HLS implementations are summarized in Table 1. Vitis Core Development Kit 2019.2 (Kathail, 2020) is used for synthesis with a Xilinx Kintex UltraScale FPGA (part number xcku115-flvb2104-2-i) as the target device and a clock frequency of 200 MHz The reported resource usage numbers reflect the synthesis estimates from Vivado HLS The latency and II reported here are the maximum values for samples with full Vmax vertices; the actual HLS implementation allows early termination of the serial reuse of the vertex-processing logic unit for samples with fewer vertices The area under the ROC curve (AUC) and overall response root mean square (RMS) are used to summarize the performance TABLE 1. Summary of the latency, II, FPGA resource usage metrics, and inference accuracy metrics of the synthesized firmware. The reported resource usage numbers reflect the synthesis estimates from Vivado HLS. The target FPGA is a Xilinx Kintex UltraScale FPGA (part number xcku115-flvb2104-2-i), which has 5,520 DSPs, 663,360 LUTs, 1,326,720 FFs, and 77.8 Mb of BRAM (Xilinx, 2020) The utilized percentage of the targeted FPGA resources are denoted in the square brackets The quantized model fits in one slice in all metrics Given the small difference in the inference performance between the two models it is clear that the quantized model is advantageous for this specific case study The latency of the synthesized quantized model at 148 clock periods satisfies the LHC L1T requirement of O(1) μs execution the II of 50 clock periods (250 ns) implies that the logic must be time-multiplexed tenfold to be able to process a single cluster per LHC beam crossing period of 25 ns With O(100) or more clusters expected per beam crossing in the collision environment of HL-LHC the throughput of the synthesized firmware is therefore inadequate for a reasonably sized L1T calorimeter system with O(100) FPGAs and requires down-scoping or implementation improvements The simplest down-scoping measure is to reduce the size of the input. This is effective because the most prominent factor driving both the latency and the II of the firmware is Rreuse (see Eq. 10) which in turn is determined by Vmax to be able to fit the logic in a single chip To test how short the II can be made while retaining a reasonable inference performance and 16 are trained and synthesized into FPGA firmware Clusters with more hits than Vmax are truncated by discarding the lowest energy hits The fraction of truncated clusters for the three Vmax values are 27% The results of synthesis of the additional models are given in the last three rows of Table 1 The values of FPGA resource usage metrics are similar in all quantized models because the ratio Vmax/Rreuse is kept at 4 The area under the ROC curve (AUC) and the root-mean-square (RMS) of the response are considered as metrics for the inference performance Only a modest degradation of performance is observed by truncating the clusters to Vmax=64 while the II is reduced by 16 clocks as a direct result of the reduction of Rreuse by the same amount This working point might thus represent a reasonable compromise between the inference performance and throughput Further cluster truncation results in considerable loss of inference accuracy It is also clear that reduction of Rreuse has a diminishing return in terms of shorter II and improvements to other parts of the algorithm are necessary to further reduce the II we presented an implementation of a graph neural network algorithm as FPGA firmware with O(1) μs execution time General considerations and challenges in implementing graph neural networks for real-time trigger systems at particle collider experiments are outlined along with how algorithms such as GarNet address these issues We then described the simplified version of GarNet which is now available as a general-purpose graph network layer in the hls4ml library An example use case of a machine learning model based on the simplified version of GarNet applied to data from a simulation of a small imaging calorimeter The model is able to learn to predict the identity and the energy of the particles detected at the calorimeter with high accuracy while its firmware implementation executes in 740 ns and fits easily in a commercially available FPGA Although the throughput of the firmware is not sufficient to make the model readily deployable in a submicrosecond its variants with reduced input size are shown to have higher throughput with reasonable inference performance These results demonstrate that fast inference of graph neural networks in FPGAs is possible various graph-based machine learning architectures can be automatically translated into firmware The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found below: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3992780, doi:10.5281/zenodo.3992780. Simulation data set and the KERAS source code used for the case study are available on the Zenodo platform (Iiyama, 2020) All authors listed have made a substantial and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication VL and JN are supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No and NT are supported by Fermi Research Alliance PH is supported by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology University grant ZW is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants Nos Office of High Energy Physics Early Career Research program under Award No CERN has provided the open access publication fee for this paper The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest We acknowledge the Fast Machine Learning collective as an open community of multi-domain experts and collaborators This community was important for the development of this project Abadi, M., Agarwal, A., Barham, P., Brevdo, E., Chen, Z., Citro, C., et al. 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Available at: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=S1_pAu9xl CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar Kreinar E and Wu Z (2021) Distance-Weighted Graph Neural Networks on FPGAs for Real-Time Particle Reconstruction in High Energy Physics Received: 25 August 2020; Accepted: 26 October 2020;Published: 12 January 2021 Copyright © 2021 Iiyama, Cerminara, Gupta, Kieseler, Loncar, Pierini, Qasim, Rieger, Summers, Van Onsem, Wozniak, Ngadiuba, Di Guglielmo, Duarte, Harris, Rankin, Jindariani, Liu, Pedro, Tran, Kreinar and Wu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited in accordance with accepted academic practice distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms *Correspondence: Yutaro Iiyama, eXV0YXJvLmlpeWFtYUBjZXJuLmNo Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher 94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or goodLearn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish From batteries to connecting your phone via bluetooth and asking for help to navigate the way home Whether you want to build your own home theater or just learn more about TVs Press Windows + PrtScn to capture your screen in Windows 8 and later you may notice that the image you saved looks a bit off If the image doesn't take up the entire canvas in Paint drag the bottom right corner of the canvas toward the top left of the screen until you reach the corners of your screenshot To take a screenshot on a Mac press Command+Shift+3 to screenshot the entire screen Press Command+Shift+4 to draw and select an area to screenshot Press Command+Shift+5 for additional options use a voice command to tell Google Assistant to take a screenshot by saying take a screenshot." Another option: Press and hold Power + Volume Down Find your screenshot in the Photo Gallery or Screenshot folder To take an iPhone screenshot on iPhones without a Home button simultaneously press the Side and Volume Up buttons The screenshot will save to the Photos app press the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button simultaneously Get the Latest Tech News Delivered Every Day Tags a rumour went around claiming that Microsoft was working on a Gears of War Remaster one that would bring the franchise to PlayStation for the first time Microsoft has announced Gears of War: Reloaded You don't need to be rich to be competitive iiyama has announced an affordable gaming monitor boasting up to 280Hz refresh rate this display is specifically designed for esports enthusiasts and professional gamers G-Master GB2795HSU-B1 Gold Phoenix is a 27in monitor featuring a 280Hz refresh rate VA panel The brand claims a 0.2ms (MPRT) response time This makes it one of the fastest VA-based displays the GB2795HSU-B1 enjoys a nice 4000:1 contrast ratio – bringing the shadows in games and films to life – alongside 300nits of brightness this makes it a one-stop-shop for story-driven and competitive titles alike but I wouldn’t hold my breath for it given the lack of local dimming zones this monitor has what it needs where it needs it you get support for FreeSync Premium to counter screen tearing a flicker-free blacklight to reduce eye fatigue and an adjustable stand to put you in a comfortable position to collect those frags the GB2795HSU-B1 can adjust height by 150mm You also get a 100mm VESA mount if you prefer a wall or arm mount you will find one HDMI 2.0 plus one DisplayPort 1.4 “We know how important it is to have the right gear in competitive play The monitor’s 280Hz refresh rate and near-instant response time deliver the precision and smoothness gamers need to stay ahead of the competition,” said Jeffry Pettinga this seems like a great gaming monitor for those of you who like to be competitive yet can’t afford spending too much on a single component Just don’t expect it to beat more expensive models The iiyama G-Master GB2795HSU-B1 Gold Phoenix gaming monitor is available for £199.99 or €199.95 on UK and French retailers Monitor maker Unitcom has released the iiyama PC featuring a 14-inch or 16-inch design and plenty of other attractive features The iiyama PC comes with Intel's Core Ultra Series 2 processors and the body of the laptop uses magnesium alloy to make the device lightweight without sacrificing sturdiness Thanks to the alloy, the 14-inch version of the iiyama PC can weigh less than 1kg, which is extremely light for a laptop. For comparison, the 14-inch MacBook Pro weighs in at 1.55kg with the lightest M3 chipset Anyone who has looked to travel with a laptop knows that weight is basically the most important consideration which requires the laptop to use newer Intel chips to unlock various AI features within Windows and its associated apps There's also a 5MP webcam for good measure The downside to wanting Unitcom's iiyama PC is that sadly it will only ever be available in Japan While that might suit some frequent travellers to Japan we'll have to resign ourselves to never getting our hands on one for 169,800 yen (£870) and 194,800 yen (£997) for the 14-inch model and 199,800 yen (£1,000) for the 16-inch model Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news features and guidance your business needs to succeed Seeing as the iiyama is not widely available, TechRadar has spent a lot of time checking out all of the best business laptops on the market In our considered opinion, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 is the best thing out there right now and a pretty lightweight and portable design For anyone on a budget, we recommend the Acer Travelmate P4 which has slightly less impressive specs but can easily be upgraded has decent battery life and a Thunderbolt port Max Slater-Robins has been writing about technology for nearly a decade at various outlets covering the rise of the technology giants he currently lives in London and likes a good night out and walks in the countryside Tags MSI is preparing to launch a new 4K OLED gaming monitor We’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating; when contemplating a single component upgrade for 2023 put a new monitor right at the top of your list Display technology has come on heaps and bounds in recent years and while a faster SSD or more memory can help enhance the PC experience The good news is you don’t need to break the bank to get dramatic results While top-end gaming monitors on the bleeding edge of resolution and refresh rate will fetch a pretty penny casual users seeking a combination of productivity and gaming credentials will find plenty to like for under £500 ultrawide displays have begun to dominate the landscape with just about every big-name manufacturer including UWQHD solutions as part of their portfolio iiyama’s ProLite XCB3494WQSN looks a formidable proposition Pricing is sensible at just under £450 if you shop around and specifications suggest iiyama is aiming for home-office users who work by day and play by night iiyama employs a 34in ultrawide VA panel touting a 1500R curve and 3440×1440 UWQHD resolution We’re of the opinion a curve is only worthwhile on an ultrawide format and a 1500R implementation works particularly well here; it’s subtle enough to bring you closer to the content without any feeling of distortion It is common to look upon VA as an inferior cousin to IPS While the latter tends to offer superior colour and viewing angles viewing angles are actually rather good in all directions and the main plus points of VA – affordable pricing deep blacks and impressive contrast – all remain present What’s useful about the ProLite is that it straddles both work and play to good effect a matte finish is complemented by a 120Hz refresh rate and there’s FreeSync adaptive synchronisation in the 48-120Hz range Decent credentials for a Pro-marketed monitor do factor in a capable GPU as you need to maintain reasonably high framerates to prevent ghosting which becomes more apparent at 60fps or below Always good to know a monitor can game effectively but it is in the office that the XCB3494WQSN sets itself apart amid a sea of UWQHD competitors An ultrawide canvas naturally bodes well for productivity and iiyama augments those underlying credentials with good connectivity and Such functionality is a real boon for users who regularly juggle two PCs it is essentially an internal switch that allows an array of connected peripherals to be shared between multiple PCs iiyama’s available ports include HDMI 2.0 a three-port USB Type-A hub and a headphone jack etc.) directly to the monitor for simpler cabling All those devices are made available to a PC hooked up via DisplayPort and USB and carry over to a laptop when docked via USB-C the laptop will also charge via the single cable at up to 65W and if you connect to your network via the monitor’s Ethernet port As a frequent laptop user it’s a feature that holds genuine merit and there are some limitations to be aware of Users seeking a one-stop solution for desktop laptop and games console should be aware that the HDMI port is restricted to 100Hz at the native resolution peak panel brightness of 300 nits results in a basic HDR experience iiyama chooses not to integrate a webcam as standard You do get perfunctory stereo speakers that are adequate for everyday use and we like the fact that iiyama includes a proper joystick and tactile buttons for navigating a clear and uncluttered OSD allows 130mm of height adjustment and +20°/-3° tilt we’d prefer the stand didn’t allow for rotation into portrait mode; the function serves no purpose here – there isn’t enough clearance plus a tall curved ultrawide makes little sense – and allowing such movement means you’re never entirely sure the screen is perfectly horizontal An ultrawide canvas and built-in KVM are key reasons to consider the ProLite XCB3494WQSN it’s important to consider usage scenario but it is a productivity solution first and foremost some workloads favour an ultrawide format better than others Users who spend a lot of time scrolling websites may prefer more vertical pixels but anyone accustomed to multi-tasking with multiple windows will deem the upgrade revolutionary you’ve not lived until you’ve authored spreadsheets on an ultrawide Our in-house testing reveals the panel is capable in most regards Achieving 100 per cent sRGB colour coverage is light work for most modern displays but AdobeRGB and DCI-P3 tests help separate the wheat from the chaff The iiyama delivers solid results in terms of gamut where it achieves chart-topping results with zero calibration on our part Brightness isn’t the XCB3494WQSN’s strong suit This doesn’t affect general use – we’re actually inclined to turn brightness down when working – but the HDR experience is naturally limited We’ve spoken about improvements in display technology in general and uniformity is certainly an area in which we’re seeing good progress our review sample delivers excellent consistency from side to side Going large can take a toll on power consumption but limited peak brightness and a shortage of frills ensure the iiyama is one of the most efficient monitors in its class Japanese manufacturer iiyama has been producing computer monitors for over four decades and continues to serve as a go-to brand for consumers and businesses who know what they want The firm’s success revolves around high-quality products that tick the relevant boxes without the need for frivolous extras 2023’s ProLite XCB3494WQSN doesn’t push the boat out in any one area yet serves as a satisfying ultrawide workhorse that covers multiple bases One of the better VA panels we’ve tested and an increasingly popular 3440×1440 resolution that works well in a 34in ultrawide format Such credentials make the ProLite a noteworthy upgrade for any user migrating from a common 1080p panel and the attraction is heightened by a built-in KVM Switching between laptop and desktop has never been easier Verdict: Competitive pricing and well-rounded specs make this an ultrawide worth considering The design is inoffensive and eschews perceived gamer accoutrements such as RGB lighting or advanced OSDs Six buttons offer simple control over the screen's functions - we'd still prefer a rear-mounted joystick - and it's good to see FreeSync Premium Pro is activated out of the box characterised by a solid stand attaching via one captive screw Providing firm foundations that limit vibrations be aware you need 26cm of desk depth and 48cm width to accommodate the three-pronged base There's nothing untoward in display orientation as 18° of upward tilt and 3° downward is usual 130mm of height adjustment enables the screen to be put into portrait mode and iiyama's matte finish does an excellent job of repelling fingerprints We'd describe the design as functional rather than frivolous the power supply is integrated into the back deliver rudimentary audio that's understandably lacking in heft and quality This isn't viewed as a problem as most gamers tend to don headsets A small clip promotes clean routing of cables Make your money go a long way with a modern ultrawide panel The relentless speed of product launches highlights a buoyant display market Rarely does a day go by without another new monitor and a vast array of choice is a good thing meaning you can bag a meaningful upgrade without breaking the bank Japanese firm iiyama tends to play at the forefront of the value segment keen pricing applies to even glamourous panels it touts 180Hz refresh rate and complete immersion Such criteria would have cost a pretty penny not so long ago that’s probably about the same as your monthly council tax iiyama’s supplied stand isn’t the most versatile There’s no option to pivot or even swivel though you do get 110mm of height adjustment these concessions actually make sense on a gaming-first solution; you’re going to sit front and centre and limiting movement helps minimise unwanted wobble The absence of a cable-routing hole bugs me a little more and connectivity is decent but not spectacular a headphone jack and a two-way USB Type-A hub Do note that DisplayPort is the only option to enable 180Hz at the native UWQHD resolution falls short of the 120Hz supported by modern game consoles requiring only a few simple screws to affix the base to the standard VESA mount There aren’t any gaudy gamer embellishments and a backlit joystick lining the screen’s bottom-right edge manages control though navigating the OSD is more cumbersome than it ought to be A pair of perfunctory stereo speakers provide basic onboard sound but it’s clear the GCB3480WQSU is lacking in the extras department a place to hang your headphones or even an on-screen crosshair it’s up to the panel itself to do the talking iiyama’s 34in VA carries a 1500R curve well suited to an ultrawide A 3440×1440 resolution is commonplace with this form factor and the matte finish does a good job of keeping reflections at bay VA’s weak points remain to some degree but shouldn’t put you off purchase Viewing angles are forgiving in all directions you retain benefits such as superior contrast to that of an IPS it’s important to note this is a native 165Hz panel pushed to the limit in achieving the advertised 180Hz speed such refresh rates are only availed by enabling a manual overclock via the OSD despite a pop-up warning of potential flickering or black screens We’ve experienced neither and even with the OC enabled FreeSync Premium Pro adaptive synchronisation is supported in the 48-180Hz range Whether you’ll be able to tell the difference between 165Hz and 180Hz is a different question entirely Pixel response time tends to be a challenge for VA solutions Anything less and trailing will vary from noticeable to unmissable iiyama includes a choice of two overdrive modes to help reduce blur it’s hard not to feel immersed when in game a regular 1080p60 screen are in for an eye-opening experience More and more games are making better use of ultrawide resolutions and once you’ve broadened your horizon it’s worth downloading Microsoft Flight Simulator for the visuals alone Given GCB3480WQSU is a relatively affordable VA panel but don’t expect colours to pop in quite the same way as an IPS Our readings suggest iiyama’s quoted 420-nit brightness is extremely accurate. Ample for most environments, and minimum brightness drops low enough for comfort in a dark room. Good results, and though it goes without saying at this price point, HDR is supported but not ideal. You’ll want an OLED to experience the true brilliance of high dynamic range left) is wonderfully consistent across the ultrawide panel right) falls short of our preferred 10 per cent limit it isn’t detrimental to the overall experience iiyama may be pushing its 34in ultrawide to the limit at 180Hz yet power consumption remains suitably restrained 45 watts at peak brightness is the most frugal we’ve seen from any ultrawide in this class expansive and eye-opening monitors are a prime upgrade path for 2024 with an abundance of options at keen price points Ultrawides are among the fastest growing segments and rising popularity is helping lower prices Those awaiting potent specifications on a budget should take a closer look at iiyama’s G-Master GCB3480WQSU this curved 34in screen cranks an increasingly common 3440×1440 resolution to 180Hz Provided your graphics hardware can deliver the requisite framerates – 100fps would be a solid baseline – the end results can be spectacular this is a well-rounded VA panel with broad appeal Verdict: A stellar first ultrawide and meaningful upgrade from a good ol’ 16:9 monitor Both employ slim bezels to give an edge-to-edge appearance with the only blemish on the Iiyama being an ugly sticker that proclaims all of its features there’s quite a feature list: you can flip it into portrait mode plus there are two side-mounted USB 3 ports for easy access The Iiyama also uses the same IPS panel technology as the Eizo and there isn’t a huge gulf between the two when it comes to image quality The ProLite even covers more of the sRGB gamut (93.6% versus 88%) with an outstanding average Delta E of 0.81 while its measured contrast ratio of 1,192:1 is great too All of those results came in the monitor’s preset sRGB mode which bizarrely locks you into 100% brightness – and it’s bright at 278cd/m2 We assume that Iiyama was aiming for a 6500K colour temperature with this setting but it actually measured at 6367K – which isn’t a disaster but if you’re sensitive to such things then you’ll need to create your own profile using the OSD This is where the Eizo proved light years ahead with context-sensitive controls that show you what each button does before you press it while the Iiyama relies on the time-honoured and highly annoying system of rear-mounted buttons – but with no onscreen cues explaining what each does It’s also too easy to accidentally switch off the panel by pressing the bottom-most button but the Iiyama ProLite XUB2493HSU-B1 pulls the win out of the bag with a flexible stand – it even offers 130mm of height adjustment – and a price that none of its equally reputable rivals can match Sign up today and you will receive a free copy of our Future Focus 2025 report - the leading guidance on AI cybersecurity and other IT challenges as per 700+ senior executives Tim DantonSocial Links NavigationTim Danton is editor-in-chief of PC Pro the UK's biggest selling IT monthly magazine and is also author of a book called The Computers That Made Britain You can contact Tim directly at editor@pcpro.co.uk It's definitely no secret that you can find some of the most unique and exciting experiences in Japan and we've put together a list of a few bizarre places to visit while you're there Stroll down Denim Street in Kojima "the birthplace of Japanese denim" experience the vibrant fusion of American and Japanese cultures at the American Village in Okinawa immerse yourself in the magical winter wonderland of the Igloo Village in Iiyama We've provided great-value flights to get you to Japan starting from $520 round trip which is referred to as the ‘birthplace of Japanese denim’ This district is located right on the outskirts of Tokyo You can also indulge in denim-themed foods like Denim Beer a village in southern Japan where scarecrows outnumber humans Unlike the simple scarecrows found in US cornfields these are crafted to resemble the village's former residents positioned in lifelike poses as if continuing their daily routines Wander through a school populated with child-like scarecrows offering a truly unique and spine-chilling Halloween experience These unique bus stops in Nagasaki are shaped like various fruits such as strawberries They were originally created for the 1990 Travel Expo Each stop is designed with intricate detail making them not only functional but also delightful photo opportunities for visitors There's actually an American-themed village in Japan this may not be at the top of your list to visit it's cool to get a Japanese take on American culture including a large Ferris wheel that provides stunning views of the area There's also a nearby beach to check out that'll make you feel like you're in coastal California or Florida located in the town of Iiyama in Nagano Prefecture offers a magical winter wonderland experience the Kamakura Snow Festival transforms the area into a picturesque village of snow huts or "kamakura." Visitors can explore these beautifully crafted igloos and participate in various snow activities creating a serene and enchanting atmosphere you will regularly receive our best vacation deals and travel information By giving your consent, you also accept in accordance with Art. 49 para. 1 lit. a GDPR that your data may be processed in the USA. You can unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time. You can find more information in our privacy policy We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience By clicking "Accept All" you accept this and consent that we share this information with third parties and that your data may be processed in the USA You can adjust your preferences at any time we will use only the essential cookies and unfortunately you will not receive any personalized content good and feature-laden it’s usually a question of picking two of the three because you seldom get all of them together Iiyama is trying to square that circle with its new G-Master gaming monitor which combines a vast 44.5in curved VA 5K panel with a price tag of less than £800 Iiyama hasn’t skimped on the ancillary features so you get a USB hub with KVM support and Ethernet a more than decent speaker system and a stand with more adjustment options than you generally get with ultrawide monitors regardless of price the G-Master GCB4580DQSN seems to offer it all iiyama G-Master Red Eagle GCB4580DQSN-B1 Curved 45 Inch VA LED Monitor DQHD 165Hz HDMI DP USB 3.2 USB-C Dock 0.8ms 90W RJ45 (LAN) KVM Switch HDR400 Height Adjustment FreeSync Black Check price Iiyama G-Master GCB4580DQSN-B1 review: What do you get for your money?The meat and veg of the GCB4580DQSN-B1 is the 5,120 x 1,440 VA panel with a pixel density of 120ppi slightly more than the 109dpi you get from a 2,560 x 1,440 27in panel This difference is invisible to the naked eye meaning it forms a segment of a circle with a 1,500mm or 1.5m radius 1500R is arguably the sweet spot between the highly immersive 1000R form for gaming and the 1800R flatter format The cabinet is a chunky black plastic affair with no fancy LED lights Iiyama describes the monitor as “three sides frameless” which translates into bezel widths of 10mm at the top and sides The stand is highly adjustable for an ultrawide: there’s 45 degrees of pivot and swivel 130 degrees of height adjustment and tilt between -3 and +20 degrees Underneath the quick-release stand bracket you’ll find 100 x 100mm and 200 x 100mm VESA mounts All the monitor’s ports are grouped on the back face down which makes plugging cables in a little easier than it would otherwise be Navigating the display’s menu system is done via a small joystick under the front of the cabinet and there are pre-assigned shortcuts to each of the stick’s compass points: these are Input It would be nice if these were customisable but It should go without saying that the G-Master GCB4580DQSN-B1 is big and rather heavy so you might need assistance setting it up and you’ll want to check quite carefully if it will fit on your desk READ NEXT: Best monitors Iiyama deserves a pat on the back for fitting the GCB4580DQSN with a good selection of ports DisplayPort 1.4 and a DP Alt Mode USB-C port that also supports 90W PD charging you’ll also find a USB-B port and three USB-A ports – all 5Gbits/sec speed – a 3.5mm audio jack and a gigabit Ethernet port they turn the Iiyama into a fine USB hub with full KVM (keyboard coupled with the G-Master’s Picture-by-Picture function means you can run two 2,560 x 1,400 displays That isn’t just useful for work; it means you can game in one space and run video The one criticism I have here is that you can’t assign a shortcut to swap your keyboard and mouse between workspaces so you have to open the menu then KVM and swap the mouse and keyboard input there Given that the joystick supports four shortcuts on the L/R/Forward/Back axes it’s a shame you can’t make one of them a KVM switch A KVM shortcut is far more valuable than instant access to the Night Mode which is basically a three-position brightness control READ NEXT: Best budget monitors which means that in fast eSports games things aren’t as sharp as I’d like The issues are very hard to discern in Triple-A gaming and it could be argued that a 165Hz ultrawide gaming display is not what you’d buy for eSports gaming in the first place There’s a five-position Overdrive adjustment but this doesn’t change much other than reducing the levels of inverse ghosting There are other options such as Direct Drive and the five-position Motion Blur Reduction system but these don’t have much effect either and enabling them means having to run without adaptive sync enabled the GCB4580DQSN makes a good account of itself There’s plenty of colour around colour reproduction at 123.3% of sRGB The GCB4580DQSN doesn’t have any pre-set colour profiles but the average Delta E variance against the sRGB profile registered at a perfectly commendable 1.9 making it suitable for some creative work out of the box brightness and contrast ratio aren’t an issue In HDR playback – something you need to enable in the monitor menu as well as in Windows – the maximum brightness level jumps to 503cd/m2 when measuring a white patch 10% the size of the screen area against a black background That’s more than enough to earn the Iiyama its VESA DisplayHDR 400 certification How does HDR content look on the GCB4580DQSN sumptuous colours and great levels of contrast it’s better than on a non-Mini-LED IPS panel playing Triple-A games that support the ultrawide format Halo Infinite was a very impressive experience: smooth I don’t think you can do better for this sort of money aggressively curved panels tend not to be poster children for uniformity but the measurements from the GCB4580DQSN were solid enough with all but five of the 25 rectangles measured across the screen (those on the far left) falling inside the recommended luminance tolerance levels READ NEXT: Best laptops Buried inside the cabinet are two 3W speakers as measured against a pink noise source at a 1m distance That’s enough to fill a reasonably sized room with ease They’re not only loud but they sound great producing deep and resonant audio with lots of bass They’re right at home pumping out the soundtracks to the likes of Metal: Hellsinger or The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt where power and volume are the watchwords rather than delicacy or detail The one area where Iiyama needs to up its game is the menu system The design is starting to look rather dated and navigation is clunky compared to what’s on offer from some of the competition The presence of some arcane features that have little effect on the onscreen proceedings doesn’t help matters I get the feeling that features such as the X-Res Technology feature which apparently “enhances text and images to appear crisper and raise the sense of sharpness” (I had to look that up I couldn’t work out what it did just by using it) I’d rather Iiyama ditched the peripheral gobbledegook and gave gamers what they want all of which are missing from the GCB4580DQSN When you’re not gaming – or gaming and doing other stuff simultaneously – the display’s versatility comes into its own with full KVM capability and the option to run two 2.5K 16:9 workspaces side by side. In every way, then, the Iiyama G-Master GCB4580DQSN-B1 is a lot of display for your money. iiyama routinely figures in Club386 monitor recommendations for good reason For over four decades the Japanese firm has overlooked superfluous extras in favour of good-quality panels covering essentials producing dependable displays that don’t break the bank We expected similar traits when the G-Master GB3467WQSU-B1 Red Eagle landed on our test bench and the 34in Ultrawide has not disappointed While the product name doesn’t roll off the tongue for under £500 (£430 at the time of writing) GB3467WQSU presents an ultrawide 3440×1440 resolution at up to 165Hz on a curved VA panel Potentially good for productivity and great for gaming Yep, there’s little in the way of flair in evidence here. RGB lighting external remotes and metal accents are all absent Some might argue a monitor’s frame shouldn’t detract from the panel itself and to that end iiyama ticks the right boxes a singular status LED is tiny (and can be switched off entirely) and both the top and side panels are reasonably svelte the ‘borderless’ design isn’t quite what it suggests as the image starts just over a centimetre from the edge it’s a modern-looking piece of kit and a subtle 1500R curve helps envelop the user without feeling off-putting Do note however the stand offers limited versatility While it’s good to have height adjustment of up to 130mm there’s no option to swivel and the base’s feet are on the large side the matte-black stand also supports a 90° rotation into portrait mode though attempting to do so would result in the panel hitting the desk iiyama resorts to a sticker advising users “pivot function is not support,” but we’d rather the stand didn’t allow for such movement to minimise the risk and help prevent unwanted wobble so without a spirit level you’re never entirely sure the screen is perfectly horizontal A 100mm VESA mount is easily accessible should you prefer to use your own stand and the back of the panel is also home to all of the monitor’s controls and inputs though do be aware that HDMI 2.0 only scales to 100Hz at the native resolution but PC gamers can achieve the maximum 165Hz refresh rate via DisplayPort We appreciate the built-in power supply – meaning no external brick – and iiyama thankfully doesn’t attempt anything too fancy or gamer-orientated with regards to OSD and navigation and moving between menus is made easy via a joystick and series of tactile buttons lining the monitor’s rear-right edge and there’s just enough space between the three control buttons and power button to ensure you don’t inadvertently turn off the screen If there’s a criticism of iiyama’s simplistic implementation it’s that the perfunctory 2W stereo speakers are particularly basic Void of definition in either the highs or lows they serve a purpose for basic notifications but for gaming or multimedia use you’ll want to employ an external set or a pair of headphones Any ultrawide canvas should specialise in productivity or immersive gaming iiyama’s 3440×1440 resolution and 21:9 aspect ratio is a real boon when working with multiple windows side-by-side The native resolution at a 34in screen size is sufficient to keep Windows scaling to 100 per cent and though we’ve enjoyed using the GB3467WQSU as an everyday workhorse Though our benchmarks reveal out-the-box accuracy to be very good – more on that later – VA panel technology does result in visible colour shift from side to side We don’t notice it when sat front and centre but wouldn’t recommend this particular model for a super-wide While premium competitors have outfitted their ultrawides with built-in KVMs and integrated webcams iiyama does nothing of the sort and clearly views the GB3467WQSU as a gaming-first solution To that end there’s a rapid 0.4ms response time (MPRT) and FreeSync support in the 48-165Hz range (48-100Hz over HDMI) Games supporting and making good use of a 21:9 aspect ratio are increasing in number and though some developers do it better than others there’s no doubt that an ultrawide resolution can significantly enhance the sense of immersion We’ve had the pleasure of playing (ahem testing) a number of games and have ascertained that while iiyama officially quotes a panel brightness of 550cd/m² and HDR400 certification real-world HDR experience is basic at best No surprise given that HDR is turned off by default but such expectations should be kept in check At its best the GB3467WQSU is geared for fast SDR gaming with no perceptible tearing Keeping between the FreeSync window shouldn’t be difficult with most modern graphics cards – 3440×1440 renders 40 per cent fewer pixels than native 4K making it far more forgiving on GPU firepower – and response times feel noticeably quick iiyama offers a choice of five overdrive settings The upper modes result in more overshoot than we’re comfortable with but settings 2-3 work well in fast-paced shooters where every millisecond counts We wouldn’t expect chart-topping results at this price point yet we’re suitably impressed with iiyama’s 88 per cent DCI-P3 colour coverage (that translates to 100 per cent sRGB by the way) and very good out-the-box accuracy We consider any delta-E score of less than 1.5 to be bordering on excellent Brightness is practically in line with iiyama’s quoted 550cd/m² and while a VA panel’s viewing angles may not be quite as forgiving as IPS you do have the added benefit of deeper blacks and superior contrast There is a small amount of black crush to contend with as you shift off centre yet gamers who tend to play in darkened rooms will appreciate brightness can be dropped right down to a comfortable 86cd/m² increasingly bright displays typically take a toll on power draw but for a 34in solution the iiyama can be kept frugal 24 watts at minimum brightness is very efficient for a screen of this ilk Have manufacturers started to get a grip of screen uniformity on ultrawide panels Such measurements used to highlight a potential disadvantage; iiyama suggests this is no longer the case yet the GB3467WQSU delivers excellent results in terms of both colour and luminance consistency Picking a PC monitor upgrade is a balancing act with users having to weigh-up various pros and cons to find a panel that best suits their needs Gamers in particular face an onslaught of cutting-edge tech that can cost a pretty penny while still feeling rough around the edges Those favouring a more modest approach ought to take a closer look at the iiyama G-Master GB3467WQSU-B1 Red Eagle Massaging a 34in VA panel into a subtly curved 21:9 form factor the ultrawide display delivers heightened immersion through a crisp 3440×1440 native resolution rendered at up to 165Hz and though you should be aware of certain trade-offs – HDR is basic and familiar VA limitations such as black crush are present – there’s enough here to deliver a hugely enjoyable gaming experience Fast response with a wide range of overdrive settings add to the appeal and with both FreeSync and G-Sync compatibility you’re guaranteed a tear-free experience irrespective of GPU Verdict: a fine example of a modern VA-based ultrawide the 34in iiyama GB3467WQSU doesn’t cost the earth and offers a sensible upgrade path from ubiquitous 1080p that criticism now no longer applies; vive la change for the Iiyama ProLite XUB2792QSN-B1 is a true docking monitor and one so cheap it begs the question of why you’d spend more on a 27in screen but there’s 90° swivel and you can pivot the screen in either direction Think of it as functional Berghaus rather than fashionable Superdry for example - but that’s enough for most laptops and once connected you also have access to RJ-45 wired Ethernet and two USB-A ports You can daisy chain a second monitor via the DisplayPort output with one HDMI and one DisplayPort input available as well There’s even a pair of half-respectable (if treble-heavy) speakers The 2,560 x 1,440 resolution is perfectly adequate for most tasks but one area where Iiyama falls behind is the quality of its OSD which feels old-fashioned due to its reliance on physical buttons but the left/right buttons don’t make sense when you’re navigating up and down menus colour temperature comprises a choice of three presets (6500K and the only other colour settings involve Iiyama’s prescriptive i-Style choices the Standard preset with its blazing whites will satisfy the needs of most people but if you get tired of 341cd/m2 blasting into your eyes then you can always switch to the more subdued Text mode colour coverage is roughly the same: 97% to 98% of the sRGB gamut around 76% of DCI-P3 and just over 70% of Adobe RGB with an average Delta E of 0.46 and maximum of 1.32 when we switched to the 6500K preset with a significant drop-off (up to 16%) at the edges this is difficult to spot with the naked eye you can’t argue with the value on offer that’s ideally suited to office-based tasks but just about competent enough to cope with colour-accurate design work as well wide colour gamut support or any pretensions to gaming ability What you do get is a significantly wider selection of I/O ports than most monitors costing less than £500 making the Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 the perfect home office monitor The Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 is good value at £399 but it hasn’t been ruthlessly built down to a budget so it’s still reasonably well equipped with a decent pair of speakers and a more flexible stand than you’d find on cheaper screens It won’t be winning any design awards It’s a rather anonymous affair made from black plastic though; the cabinet doesn’t creak or groan when manhandled If the design doesn’t look like something Sir Jony Ive dreamed up in a moment of inspiration Iiyama deserves a pat on the back for putting the two USB-A ports on the left side of the cabinet where they are very easy to access All the other I/O ports are on the back facing downwards as is common The monitor’s on-screen menu is accessed via five buttons on the lower rear right side of the cabinet but at least Iiyama has put a decent amount of space between the power and menu buttons so you don’t hit the wrong one too often and each button has a clear white graphic on the front of the cabinet Too many monitor makers rely on black-on-black graphics which are effectively invisible and thus useless The stand is a solid and chunky affair with a large The foot and the cabinet bracket are both attached using thumbscrews for added security although this means setting up takes a little longer than it would if the cabinet were attached with a quick-release mount Surrounding the cabinet mount is a 100 x 100mm VESA mount for use with a display or desk arm a 90-degree pivot (again to both left and right) and tilt from +23 to -5 degrees There’s a cutout to keep your cables bunched together in the middle of the stand neck READ NEXT: Best budget monitors giving users one of everything they need rather than multiple iterations of fewer ports but Iiyama has opted for a single HDMI 2.0 Gigabit LAN and USB-C ports along with one USB-B and two USB-A data ports All the USB ports are 5Gbit/sec 3.2 Gen 1 specification and the USB-C port supports both 65W power delivery and DisplayPort video input the XUB3293UHSN-B5 has genuine KVM (keyboard The best KVM monitors automatically jump between sources as you move your mouse between screens in picture-by-picture mode and have dedicated manual switches. The IIYAMA ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 lacks those niceties, so you must open the Input menu to switch between sources, but it’s still a very handy feature to have on a budget monitor With a 31.5in diagonal and a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 the ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 has a pixel density equivalent to a Full HD 15.6in laptop display That means even small text looks sharp and crisp with no visible pixel structure.The difference between 31.5in 3,840 x 2,160 and 27in 2,560 x 1,440 (that’s 140dpi vs 101dpi) is both dramatic and relevant given that some 27in displays don’t cost much less than this Iiyama and the panel is capable of reproducing a range of colours equivalent to 127.4% of the sRGB colour space Measuring the gamma and visual daylight temperature gave figures of 2.29 and 6,798K that second just a little on the cool side but not by enough to be a big huge problem The Iiyama lacks standard colour profiles; there isn’t even an sRGB mode Cool and Normal profiles and a User option with adjustable RGB sliders Measuring the Delta E variance against the sRGB standard returned an average of 2.7 certainly not for a 4K display costing this little An average Delta E of less than 1.0 means that when experts compare two colours side by side while a figure of less than 3.0 means there’s no significant difference an average person could perceive This means that for anyone other than the most exacting of creative professionals the ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 will do just fine Dividing the display into 25 segments and pointing a colorimeter at each showed the Iiyama to be impressively uniform in brightness as well with every swatch falling within the recommended tolerance level the XUB3293UHSN-B5 is not really designed for gaming I saw a fair amount of ghosting in the Blur Buster’s UFO test and although there is a five-position overdrive while four and five introduce visible overshoot without support for AMD’s FreeSync or Nvidia’s GSync One feature I was surprised not to find in the ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 was a picture-in-picture or picture-by-picture facility to run two images on the desktop simultaneously these features work better on 32:9 rather than 16:9 monitors but given the size and resolution of the ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 READ NEXT: Best webcams Given the price of the ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 I was expecting the sound system to be pretty terrible but was rather impressed by the performance of the two 3W speakers pumping out 82.4dBA as measured from a pink noise source at a 1m distance Even more surprising is that there was more than a suggestion of bass If you’re in the habit of having Spotify playing your favourite tunes in the background as you work the Iiyama’s speakers are more than up to the job There’s no built-in webcam with this monitor so if you’re looking to take part in virtual work meetings The Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 is specifically aimed at people who want a productivity monitor larger and sharper than the standard 27in 1440p norm but who would also rather not pay through the nose for the privilege crisp display at an impressively low price Given the asking price, including a basic KVM system with LAN support and a pair of reasonably tuneful speakers can only be regarded as a genuine bonus. Even without them, the ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 would be a solid recommendation. With them, this new Iiyama is an automatic Best Buy recommendation for anyone in the market for a 4K home office monitor. Iiyama is a brand that is tightly associated with monitors for creative professionals and prosumers looking primarily for accurate colors factory calibration and other features necessary for their work Iiyama finally introduced its G-Master trademark for gaming LCDs and since then the company has been gradually expanding this lineup leading to their current family of diverse devices This week the company added another monitor to the family launching its first 27-inch gaming LCD featuring a WQHD panel and a 144 Hz refresh rate The Iiyama G-Master GB2760QSU display relies on a 27-inch 6-bit+FRC TN panel featuring a 2560×1440 resolution as well as a 50 – 140 Hz refresh enabled by AMD’s FreeSync technology The monitor can display 16.7 million colors and reproduce 99% of the sRGB color space as well as 72% of the NTSC space it naturally supports Iiyama-developed modes for FPS The device also supports automatic black level adjustment function the G-Master GB2760QSU monitor has an essential set of connectors including DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI ports for contemporary computers as well as a DVI-D port for legacy systems The display is also outfitted with a dual-port USB 3.0 hub Like in case of higher-end professional monitors the G-Master GB2760QSU has an adjustable stand that can regulate the display’s height the LCD can be attached to a 100×100 mm VESA wall mounting that supports various adjustments Iiyama’s G-Master GB2760QSU display is available in select countries right now with broader availability expected in the coming weeks and months Pricing without taxes should be around $450 Source: Iiyama (via PC Watch) the Iiyama G-Master GCB4580DQSN-B1 isn't the biggest 165Hz refresh rate and as many pixels as two screens side-by-side Screen size:45inPanel:VAResolution:5120x1440Brightness:450 nits (stated)Refresh rate:165HzAudio:2x 3W speakersConnectivity:2x HDMI 2.1 EthernetDimensions:1090 x 539 x 275mmWeight:11.2kgIiyama G-Master GCB4580DQSN-B1 review: Design and build which means the edges wrap around your peripheral vision and make it easier to position yourself for optimum viewing but sitting too close means having to move your head Despite having a diagonal measurement of 45 inches (114cm) the screen is only 34cm tall - the same as a 24-inch 16:9 monitor (with a slightly thicker bezel) - so this isn’t ideal for working with lots of documents that need to be viewed in portrait orientation as the distance between the two sides is just too vast with no need to arrange your windows so they’re not across the join It also means there's only one stand on your desk (there’s a VESA mount on the back of the GCB4580DQSN-B1 but it’s the less common 200x100mm size) and only one cable feeding the video signal all conveniently labelled for ease of finding which delivers 90W of power to your laptop and means you can connect it via a single cable if it has the appropriate port itself (Thunderbolt You’ll find two HDMIs, a single DisplayPort, and the USB and Ethernet ports comprising its useful KVM and hub. You can switch between two computers, one connected by USB-C and the other by USB and a video port, allowing you to swap between a gaming PC and a MacBook enabling high-speed network capability to be shared The supplied stand allows 130mm of height adjustment though this isn’t a screen you’ll want to use in portrait orientation - it’s useful for accessing the ports at the back though a display technology noted for its high contrast and wide colour response that’s often used by TV manufacturers who haven’t made the jump to OLED it shows off the technology’s switching speed with a maximum refresh rate of 165Hz The screen’s claimed maximum brightness is 450 nits and while that may be true for HDR content we found that in everyday use 378 was about as high as it would go The screen displays 100% of the sRGB gamut, 81% of Adobe RGB and 88% of P3 The resolution of 5120 x 1440 works out to 7.4 million pixels and a further resolution limit is imposed by the fact you probably won’t be using all those pixels at once as you might on a regular widescreen monitor sitting back and enjoying both the way an ultrawide monitor like this improves your daily work life if you’re in the habit of having multiple applications open at the same time and also just how cool it looks on your desk,  The £800 asking price for the GCB4580DQSN-B1 looks pretty reasonable alongside the LG Ultragear 49GR85DC and Samsung Neo G9 both of which are in the region of £400 more for a 49-inch screen Iiyama’s 45-incher is naturally more expensive than the multiple 34-inch options including Iiama's own GCB3480WQSU-B1 which can be had for less than £400 You’ll need a big desk and a need for multiple moderate-resolution windows to consider the big Iiyama and if you’re partial to a bit of Baldur’s Gate 3 or Horizon: Zero Dawn (both of which support ultrawide resolutions) then having a games PC or console plugged in alongside your MacBook can be a very enjoyable way to spend time with a screen like this A single ultrawide isn’t necessarily better than two separate widescreen monitors as the flexibility to rotate screens and view multiple sources at the same time may be important then being able to surround yourself with a screen in the way a large curved ultrawide can is a great way to work Ian EvendenFreelance writerIan Evenden has been a journalist for over 20 years starting in the days of QuarkXpress 4 and Photoshop 5 He now mainly works in Creative Cloud and Google Docs but can always find a use for a powerful laptop or two When not sweating over page layout or photo editing you can find him peering at the stars or growing vegetables The fastest monitors on the market today boast refresh rates in the region of 540Hz with the potential to push a few hertz higher through overclocking Much as they remain modern marvels in terms of motion clarity an unlikely champion from a bygone era has emerged to outdo even the speediest screen a YouTube has managed to drive their aged CRT to run at a whopping 700Hz Out of the box, the 22in iiyama HA202DT Vision Master Pro 512 in question runs at 85Hz with a resolution of 2,048×1,536. While its specs don’t exactly scream best gaming monitor material it is ahead of its time in other ways with its included USB hub its stock configuration isn’t what makes this screen so special Free from the constraints of fixed pixel counts this display is far more flexible when it comes to overclocking but this feat isn’t without its follies YouTuber Retro Gaming Base (via Tom’s Hardware) has been pushing this HA202DT Vision Master Pro 512 to new refresh rates for a while now they decided to go even further beyond what anyone would expect from such an antiquated monitor achieving such incredible speeds is only possible by considerably dropping resolution due to bandwidth limitations making the screen akin to a wider Nintendo Game Boy both Windows and the monitor’s OSD display improperly to the point of being unusable For a more contemporary recommendation with marvelous motion clarity, check out our Gigabyte Aorus FO27Q3 review next month’s Club386 giveaway is going big on monitors Tags high refresh or even wide gamut capability But thanks to outstanding connectivity and a very nice IPS panel It's fashionable in the monitor market of late to big up everything from gaming and content creation prowess to multimedia features and HDR sizzle But not the new Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN This monitor comes with a pure productivity pitch and is arguably all the better for it Up front and center is a large 32-inch IPS panel with full 4K resolution. Having tested out the best business monitors this display is going to provide plenty of desktop space for viewing multiple documents accommodating lots of apps and toolbars and generally allowing for smooth multi-tasking there's strong connectivity with DisplayPort enabling single-cable docking with a laptop a feature that's hard to live without once you've experienced it There's also a USB hub and ethernet to maximise that single-cable simplicity Adding even more flexibility is a full KVM switch connect both a desktop using the DisplayPort or HDMI socket and the USB-A port and then a laptop over USB-C and share keyboard mouse and other peripherals like external storage across the two machines Iiyama isn't promising the last word in color accuracy With slim bezels on three sides of its 32-inch IPS panel the Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN looks reasonably contemporary and sports a robust stand with a full range of adjustments frill-free design language is utterly anonymous and just a little joyless.  Along with the HDMI and DisplayPort sockets is a USB-C port That supports single-cable connectivity with 65W of power delivery allowing a laptop to drive the display and charge at the same time which can be passed through over the USB-C interface Just plug the USB-C cable into your laptop and all the peripherals attached to the display are included in the docking Even better, there's a KVM switch, too. That means you could, for instance, have a desktop PC permanently connected to this monitor and then connect any of the best business laptops as you come and go and external storage across the two PCs.  With a maximum quoted brightness of 350 nits and no local dimming this is unambiguously an SDR rather than HDR display Too many so-called HDR monitors fail to deliver anything close to a true HDR experience 350 nits is plenty for all but the brightest ambient light conditions with 3,840 by 2,160 and therefore full 4K native resolution it's worth noting that MacOS recognises the display correctly and offers a full range of Retina resolution options something that's not always the case with 4K monitors which looks a little pedestrian by today's standards the factory calibration in default SDR mode is very nice indeed This absolutely isn't a monitor aimed at pro image editing But it's still pretty accurate and could very much turn a hand to some generation content creation it's vibrant and punchy and just great to look at the contrast is OK rather than outstanding But the overall image quality is excellent for this class of display Iiyama claims 4ms response times and there are fully five different overdrive levels available in OSD That's probably overkill for what absolutely is not a gaming panel the fastest setting suffers from some very obvious overshoot to the extent that it's hard to imagine anyone using it this is a decently zippy display in pixel response terms and can actually make a decent fist of some gaming on the side you'd need some very serious graphics hardware for that to be an actual impediment You could pay an awful lot more for a 32-inch 4K monitor But unless you have fairly particular needs when it comes to content creation and color accuracy you wouldn't necessarily get a lot more usability and functionality for your money The Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 serves up a really lovely IPS panel with that razor-sharp 4K image quality It's particularly good value considering it includes not just a USB-C interface with 65W of power delivery As an all-round workhorse of a display, then, the Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 is one of the best monitors we’ve tested And while it isn't explicitly sold on image or color accuracy and indeed lacks HDR support or native DCI-P3 calibration this is still a nicely setup monitor with excellent image quality that makes for an extremely pleasant working companion for both PC and Mac.  Japan has a generally positive history of relations with Muslim countries Early Japanese adventurers and intellectuals such as Chūta Itō and Yasumasa Fukushima helped pioneer travel to Islamic lands And pan-Asianists in Japan often saw the Muslim domains of Central Asia and the Middle East as potential partners against European colonialism.  Japan and Turkey are said to have a particularly close relationship, born in the tragedy of the sinking of the Turkish frigate Ertuğrul in 1890 and the Japanese rescue operation which followed.  Japan’s connections with Islam are not fraught with the history of conflict between Islamic and Western forces most people in Japan have little knowledge of Islam Japan depends on the Middle East for about 90% of its crude oil imports and about 20% of its natural gas imports Good relations with Middle Eastern oil-producing countries are essential for energy security to protect people's lives and maintain socioeconomic activities The Japanese government clearly needs more and better information on Muslim countries and on Islam In January, I sat down with arguably the leading public-facing scholar of Islam and Muslim politics in Japan, Akari Iiyama The author of several books and a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles on Islam Iiyama is a fluent Arabic speaker (she has worked as a Japanese-Arabic interpreter) and has extensive experience working and living in Muslim countries.  She spoke of the importance of obtaining information on Islam and Islamic regions firsthand and of conveying that information to the general public and the Japanese government At the time of the first oil shock after the outbreak of the Fourth Middle East War in 1973 the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) classified Japan as an unfriendly country in order to be recognized as a “friendly” country by the Arab countries Japan has been developing diplomacy in the Middle East while keeping its distance from the United States Although the Japan-US alliance is the cornerstone of Japanese diplomacy Japan's Middle East diplomacy is an exception Japan has adopted an extreme appeasement policy toward Iran which is a representative of anti-American nations The US determined that this was an attack by Iran This is one more proof that Japan's appeasement policy toward Iran is failing The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in the summer of 2021 further underscored the need for Japan to understand the Muslim world.  The left-wing media in Japan often reproduces the anti-American even anti-Semitic biases one finds among so much of the Middle Eastern press For example, as I wrote in a JAPAN Forward piece last year in May of 2021 the online edition of the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper “carried an article quoting Fusako Shigenobu a former top leader of the now defunct Japanese Red Army who is currently serving a sentence for attempted murder and other crimes.”   The Mainichi not only provided a platform to a terrorist The paper also seemed to be sympathetic to some of her views Shigenobu is quoted as saying in reference to the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas ‘It’s part of a plot to bury the Palestinian people.’ What was especially disquieting was that Shigenobu’s message was sent to a gathering meant to mark the 49th anniversary of the infamous Lod Airport Massacre jointly planned by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Japanese Red Army in the name of an armed struggle for “liberation” of Palestine from Israeli “occupation.”  According to the announcement issued by the sponsors of the meeting 1972 at Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion International Airport) near Tel Aviv in Israel was part of the struggle to overcome discrimination through solidarity among different peoples The three Japanese who perpetrated the massacre — Kozo Okamoto Tsuyoshi Okudaira and Yasuyuki Yasuda — were lauded as “the three warriors.” clear endorsement of terrorism was evidenced by statements like “The comrades who set off on their desperate journey to the Ridda battle (a reference to the Lod massacre) said they were going to a ‘festival’ rather than a ‘funeral procession.’” The list of speakers at the meeting included the sociologist Shinji Miyadai and movie director Masao Adachi — himself a former member of the Japanese Red Army.  And this is hardly the only example of this kind of reporting in the Japanese press. I cover this kind of bias and anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism often in my work.  and Middle Eastern history and politics in undergraduate (Sophia University) and doctoral courses (Tokyo University) in Japan I experienced many instances of open anti-Semitism most of whom were apparently supporters of terrorist organizations like Hamas It is important to know that the professors in Japan who study Islam and the Middle East tend to be radical 2001 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the innocent airliner passengers and crew in the United States the reaction among many Japanese professors of Islamic Studies was “Banzai!” They were overjoyed at the slaughter It may be easier to understand if I say that Japanese academia is fascinated by Noam Chomsky As in the United States and Europe — for example, with American gender scholar Judith Butler — Muslim radicals are often seen by Marxists and other left-wing professors as allies in the fight against Western culture and capitalism including of course rabid anti-Israel sentiments are as common among Japanese scholars of Islam These professors radicalize their students and the result is that the Japanese people and government end up getting badly distorted advice about Muslim affairs the connection between Marxism and Islam did not end in Japan with the horrific 1972 terrorist attack by the Japanese Red Army against Israel Read other essays and interviews by Dr Jason Morgan at this link You must be logged in to post a comment ' + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.webview_notification_text + ' " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_title + " " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_text + " Iiyama Red Eagle G-MASTER GB2560HSU Analysis5 Tags While the XU2792UHSU-B1 has its undoubted attractions we think this more rounded monitor is a better choice while you do notice a lift in sharpness when you move from a 1440p to a 4K 27in screen the difference isn’t as big as you might expect 2,560 x 1,440 pixels don’t have any obvious fuzz If you’re willing to accept this argument this monitor’s advantages start multiplying it comes with a far superior stand than its sibling support for portrait mode and 90° of swivel with slim bezels on three sides and a stylish “brushed metal” effect on the bottom bezel Once you remove the marketing stickers from the front One of those stickers proclaims support for AMD’s FreeSync technology and while both a 75Hz peak refresh rate and 5ms response time would make pro gamers snicker in amusement It’s as a workday monitor that this Iiyama excels particularly if you head to Iiyama’s i-Style Standard colour profile This locks brightness to 335cd/m2 and makes the most of the natural whites of the IPS panel; it covered 99.3% of the sRGB profile with an average Delta E of 0.28 While we would recommend wider gamut panels to anyone doing colour-sensitive work It helps that Iiyama comes close to hitting the sRGB target 6500K colour temperature while offering a fine contrast ratio (for an IPS screen) of 1,227:1 We mourn the absence of USB-C and wish the speakers had a little more quality but when you marry the image quality on offer with the low price it becomes obvious why the XUB2792QSU-B1 steals the award away from its 4K rival Iiyama ProLite XB3288UHSU-B1 OSD Menu System4 Tags but if your priorities are 4K and image quality you might be taken aback when you start assembling this monitor The plastic foot stand is so light that it would be blown away by a gust of wind so it’s little wonder the screen wobbles once you start clicking the OSD buttons mounted on the underside of the bezel Note that you may want to find a monitor stand – or a hardback book – to place this monitor on We took advantage of the screen’s single piece of flexibility This is a fine-quality panel that benefits from being built in 2020 and Iiyama has tuned it beautifully: out of the box it not only looked good but performed well in our technical tests it hit 99.2% of the sRGB colour space with a 108.6% volume Note that Iiyama’s official claims of 300cd/m2 brightness are conservative at 1,102:1 its contrast is great for an IPS panel We think you’ll enjoy viewing photos and videos on this screen and there’s even a pair of 2W stereo speakers built in but we’re pleased to see them at this price but you won’t find much to significantly adjust the screen’s output There are a measly three colour temperatures to choose from (9300K while Iiyama’s selection of presets – iStyle Standard Scenery and Game – did little more than brighten or dim the action the XU2792UHSU-B1 isn’t going to wow anyone… until you show them the quality of its output and explain how little you paid for it The release of Windows 8 and iterative updates has provided renewed purpose for touchscreen monitors Regularly found as options in mainstream laptops and all-in-one PCs and touchscreen and Windows 8 makes sense and is a key selling point for various manufacturers Monitor expert Iiyama has more than 50 touch-enabled screens in its arsenal Split into five categories defined by the touch method - resistive optical and infrared - most are designed for digital signage or point of sale/point of information with the best all-round screens using projected capacitance as the input method Perhaps the best of this projected capacitance breed is the ProLite T2735MSC - a 27in full-HD monitor featuring AMVA+ technology and 10-point touch capability Pulling it out of the box reveals that the £450 T2735MSC is a substantial bit of kit Weighing in at 8.3kg and also thicker than most regular PC monitors it's really built like the proverbial tank and the screen itself is also prone to magnifying reflections more than we'd like Iiyama uses a 1,920x1,080-resolution panel measuring 27in diagonally is therefore quite large and immediately apparent when switching from our usual 2,560x1,440-pixel monitor of the same size T2735MSC uses a tough glass coating that's impervious to minor spills dust and the kinds of unintended abuse that any point of sale screen is likely to go through The touchscreen is rated to a 7H scratch-resistant hardness corresponding well with other commercial monitors using what is known as glass-on-top technology covers both the underlying panel and the bezel but the additional cost of housing a multi-point sensor array is financially detrimental insofar as it inflates cost to double that of a regular monitor High transmittance is a key attribute of a good touchscreen Iiyama's comes in at a quoted 87 per cent - a figure that's higher than average Viewing it from head-on shows that while it's a little ways off a good PC-only screen in terms of vibrancy and colour reproduction commercial-use touchscreens we've seen thus far A kickstand pulls out from the rear and enables the monitor to be tilted from 15° to an almost-flat 70° The stand is well-built and micro-adjustable such that any position can be attained with the minimum of fuss though do be aware that a reasonable amount of force is required to pull it away from the screen from the get-go exhibiting no flexing when the screen is pressed vigorously but that's less of an issue with these types of touchscreens there's the standard 100mm Vesa mount on the back A couple of 2W speakers produce fairly tinny sound that lacks any real bass heft On-screen controls are accessed by pressing the touch-sensitive buttons on the bottom-right is rather small but does have all the configuration options we'd expect and cycling through the seven submenus is intuitive; the OSD has to be navigated by the buttons rather than touch Connected to a Windows 8.1 PC via both DVI and USB 3.0 the screen produces a clean image that feels ever-so grainy compared to non-touch monitors most likely due to the glass-on-top coating whites crisp and the shipping colours relatively neutral The AMVA+ panel uses LED backlighting and is equipped with a 12ms response time and 5ms from grey-to-grey It's fine for general web browsing and watching videos; the glossy but is tripped up when playing fast-motion games The screen also does better than expected when subjected to direct sunlight most likely due to the high-luminance settings it ships with Running a battery of DisplayMate tests reveals good performance in the greyscale tests with the screen able to distinguish between the 64 steps Text is comfortably readable at the tiniest fonts while contrast is reasonable isn't great; the panel appears a little darker in each corner than in the centre The Iiyama ProLite T2735MSC monitor is available to purchase from Scan Computers* we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond we'll publish their commentary here verbatim *UK-based HEXUS community members are eligible for free delivery and priority customer service through the SCAN.care@HEXUS forum I love a good ultrawide monitor. For me, a flat, wide canvas is great for productivity, and I'm also partial to racing games, which in my opinion look terrific at a UWQHD resolution. Trouble is, a good-sized ultrawide, with decent specs, can cost a pretty penny. Top-end gaming solutions fetch north of £2,000, and creative types wanting to stretch out to 32:9 can expect to pay around £850 for the privilege But can an enjoyable ultrawide experience be achieved at vastly reduced cost we're taking a closer look at the iiyama ProLite XUB3493WQSU a 34in IPS panel touting a 3,440x1,440 resolution and FreeSync support at up to 75Hz for a mere £350 That price tag is more in keeping with my budget and first impressions are positive as the iiyama doesn't feel like a cheap imitation there are no gaudy additions to the sleek-black chassis and the overall profile is reasonably thin despite an integrated power supply resulting in no external brick though do be aware of its size; overall dimensions of 817mm (W) x 415mm (H) x 230mm (D) require a good-sized desk Finding an optimal viewing position isn't difficult as the easily assembled stand provides ample flexibility In addition to the 130mm of height adjustment and the arm attachment curiously offers the ability to pivot We say curiously as the stand isn't tall enough to accommodate a portrait orientation Being able to pivot even a little bit does make it easier to attach cables though we do wish the monitor would snap into place when exactly horizontal - it is all too easy to nudge it a degree or two off axis iiyama's clean OSD is navigated through a series of four buttons located in the rear bottom-right corner and though the control system isn't quite as intuitive as a joystick tactile buttons are much preferred over touch-sensitive controls The stand is also easily removed to reveal a widely compatible 100mm VESA mount and while the integrated 5W stereo speakers are short on clarity they deliver a token amount of bass and are fine for everyday office use or the occasional YouTube clip The question mark at this price point is whether or not the display panel itself is up to scratch Generous 178º horizontal viewing angles are a plus point with the matte finish also helping aid visibility however while brightness is decent at up to 400 nits static contrast is officially rated at only 1,000:1 both black levels and contrast are decidedly weak it feels like a token gesture as the panel doesn't have the capability to deliver anything close to an enjoyable HDR experience It is also worth pointing out that HDR and FreeSync are mutually exclusive on the ProLite XUB3493WQSU - enabling one deactivates the other - and having to choose between the two we'd opt to keep HDR turned off at all times Our testing also reveals below-average out-the-box colour accuracy yet while content creators may be disappointed the image appears vibrant and likeable to the naked eye Productivity is where the 3,440x1,440 resolution comes into its own - working with multiple windows side-by-side is a real boon - and iiyama supports picture-in-picture across a choice of inputs the IPS panel's gaming credentials are also satisfactory and though FreeSync support is limited to between 48 and 75Hz with no support for low-framerate compensation the end result is noticeably smooth provided you hit that sweet spot so GeForce users can look forward to a similarly tear-free gaming experience Not every game takes full advantage of the UWQHD resolution - some won't natively support the 21:9 aspect ratio at all - yet in the right title the results can be impressive. The biggest drawback, we feel, is the backlight bleed and clouding that's really quite evident on our review sample Such imperfections don't tend to impinge on regular desktop work but when watching multimedia or playing games with dark scenes Let's see what the benchmarks have to say before passing judgement Using a TV-sized display as a monitor always seemed like a fanciful idea Thanks to the increasing commoditization of LCD panels and the continual downward pressure that has put on monitor prices demand for large format monitors has been growing just as fast as monitors themselves And while these kinds of large monitors are still far from ubiquitous they've become an increasingly common sight in the monitor market Besides making them more accepted in general one of the benefits of the normalization of large format monitors is that it's enticed more manufacturers to enter the field has become the latest vendor to jump into the market introducing their own 42.5-inch monitor for work and play Iiyama’s ProLite X4372UHSU-B1 is a 42.5-inch monitor featuring an IPS panel with a 3840x2160 resolution The display features a typical brightness of 450 nits The monitor can reproduce 1.07 million of colors and is listed as supporting HDR but the manufacturer doesn't list how much of the DCI-P3 gamut the monitor can reproduce only noting that the LCD can cover 85% of the NTSC color gamut The manufacturer is positioning its ProLite X4372UHSU-B1 monitor for a wide range of applications the monitor supports picture-by-picture and picture-in-picture capabilities and comes with a total of four inputs: two DisplayPort 1.2 inputs The monitor also has an outbound DisplayPort for daisy-chaining it with another LCD the device has a quad-port USB hub supporting two 3.0 and two 2.0 connectors the Iiyama ProLite X4372UHSU-B1 comes with a modest stand that can only adjust tilt so it can be used with a third party stands if necessary The ProLite X4372UHSU-B1 is currently available from European retailers for around €480 Source: Iiyama (via Guru3D) it really is like having two monitors pinned together to form one gigantic workspace With a resolution of 3,440 x 1,440 you aren’t getting the same amount of area as two 27in 1440p screens; in terms of screen diagonal with the panel a gift to any spreadsheet devotee or those who like to have two or three windows in view simultaneously we found ourselves drawn in closer than with a 27in 1440p monitor and that means that its 109ppi density becomes a drawback Also note that a 21:9 ratio results in black bars on either side of most videos which is a shame when the 5W speakers are so good so you immediately benefit from excellent viewing angles It’s also strong when it comes to brightness uniformity This wasn’t the best performer in our other technical tests Its sRGB coverage of 88.6% (96.2% volume) is okay but this panel struggles to go beyond this space we pushed those figures up to 92.6% coverage and 100.9% volume Iiyama provides a handful of presets via its iStyle options – hidden away in a fiddly OSD – but only Standard gives a notable boost that was mainly because it pushed our panel to its full and magnificent brightness of 425cd/m2 (Iiyama states 400cd/m2) including height adjustment of 130mm and 90° of swivel but don’t be fooled by the fact it rotates 90° This stand doesn’t actually support pivot mode for the simple reason that it’s too short even when the height is at its maximum of 545mm Tags Iiyama has started selling its new 5K IPS monitor The ProLite XB2779QQS boasts with a 5120x2880 resolution and is available at a price point of around $900 It has a rather thin feature set and it can only display 5K resolution over a DisplayPort 1.4 interface The Iiyama ProLite XB2779QQS monitor relies on a 27-inch 6-bit + A-FRC IPS panel featuring a 5120×2880 resolution The LCD is equipped with a LED backlighting featuring a flicker-free technology which is common on many displays these days the screen is covered with glass from edge to edge The ProLite XB2779QQS is among the first 5K monitors to use a 6-bit + A-FRC IPS panel - its predecessors aimed at professionals were based either on 8-bit + A-FRC A 6-bit + A-FRC panel is considerably cheaper than the aforementioned types of display modules Iiyama says that its 6-bit + A-FRC IPS panel can display 16.7 million colors (vs but it never mentions color spaces that the monitor supports internally and how well it covers them It is completely reasonable to expect the XB2779QQS-S1 to support some form of sRGB but it is unlikely that the display can handle a high percentage of DCI-P3 The new ProLite XB2779QQS display requires a DisplayPort 1.4 connection to support a 5K resolution at 60 Hz existing 5K monitors use two DisplayPort 1.2 streams (either via two DP cables or one TB3 wire in case of the LG UltraFine 5K) the ProLite XB2779QQS also has HDMI 2.0 connectors but the monitor can only support a 3840×2160 resolution at 60 Hz over HDMI the monitor features two 2.5 W speakers and a headphone connector for added comfort Iiyama formally introduced its 27-inch 5K monitor early this month and by now the monitor is available from Amazon in France It is possible to order the ProLite XB2779QQS in the US The monitor costs around $900 in most of the countries which is a very reasonable price for a display that has a 5120×2880 resolution The 6-bit + FRC-A panel naturally has its limitations and the DisplayPort 1.4 might be a limitation but considering all the other advantages the display has the monitor still looks very competitive for people who need a 5K resolution Tags: #1080p #freesync #gaming-monitor #monitor Companies: #amd #iiyama Manufacturer: IiyamaUK price (as reviewed): £189.98 (inc. VAT) US price (as reviewed): Currently unavailable Some people may find 27” to be a poor match for a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution; for us the low pixel density puts it just at the edge of acceptable sharpness With static images and even things like desktop icons but it's less of a problem with moving images and games and in those scenarios it's actually quite satisfying looking at such a large area the TN panel offers a claimed 1ms response time and 1,000:1 static contrast ratio The refresh rate caps out at a slightly higher than usual 75Hz with AMD FreeSync supported between 48Hz and 75Hz and not large enough to enable Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) FreeSync is a great feature to have; as we've said before investment for a G-Sync screen is far higher (i.e The G2730HSU-B1 comes in three pieces: the base The assembly is very simple and uses just two pre-attached screws the simplicity carries over into the range of physical adjustments this is made worse by the screen sitting so close to the base Your only options for height adjustment are a separate monitor stand (or books) or to make use of the VESA 100 x 100 mount on the back the screen is still quite smart looking and keeps bezels around the top three sides to an absolute minimum black in-plane border around the display edge too There's a subtle brushed metal effect on the base and lower bezel as well with FreeSync and the 75Hz refresh rate supported only over the first two but the ports face downwards at the back and are limited to USB 2.0 speeds you have both line-in and line-out connectors allowing you to play sounds through the terrible in-built speakers or hijack the audio connection from the HDMI/DisplayPort inputs and use it with a better speaker system and HDMI cables are provided; a DisplayPort one is not The menu is navigated with six buttons along the bottom; these feel a little tacky Front-facing symbols tell you what you're pressing As well as the power and main menu buttons you have shortcuts to i-Style modes (specific colour settings for different game types that are best left disabled) The menu itself is relatively easy to navigate Other display options include overdrive control to limit ghosting with settings ranging from -2 to 2 and the default being 0 There's a Blue Light Reducer as well as a Black Tuner to help bring details out of shadows though the default is the User mode where all RGB values are set to 100 percent and 2.6.SpecificationsScreen size 27"Panel technology TNResolution 1,920 x 1,080Aspect ratio 16:9Maximum refresh rate 75HzVariable refresh rate Yes (FreeSync)Brightness 300cd/m2Contrast ratio 1,000:1Response time 1msConnectors 1 x DisplayPort 27" 1080p panel with a 144Hz refresh rate and FreeSync One of the cheapest FreeSync monitors on the market passes through our labs Iiyama has announced the G-Master G3266HS-B1 The new display belongs to entry-level class and offers an FHD resolution along with dynamic refresh rate of up to 144 Hz enabled by AMD’s FreeSync technology Pricing of the LCD looks rather competitive in Europe The Iiyama G-Master G3266HS-B1 monitor is based on a 31.5” VA panel with a 1920×1080 resolution a 3 ms response time as well as a 1800R curvature contrast and viewing angles offered by the monitor are typical for modern inexpensive VA panels: 400 nits The display supports AMD’s FreeSync technology The manufacturer says that the G-Master G3266HS-B1 can display 16.7 million colors but remains tightlipped about supported color spaces it is safe to say that it will be used with Windows-based PCs the monitor features everything an inexpensive LCD has to: a D-Sub and a DVI-D for legacy systems as well as DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI for modern computers the monitor has 3.5-mm audio-in/out connectors the G-Master G3266HS-B1 has a fixed stand and cannot regulate its height but can be attached to a VESA wall mounting that supports appropriate adjustments We are not sure about the MSRP of the G3266HS-B1 in the USA where it has not been officially announced yet but it is logical to expect Iiyama to maintain a similar pricing policy as in Europe Iiyama is a bit late to the curved displays party that began in 2014 – 2015 but it definitely needed to get there to stay relevant on the market of gaming monitors The G-Master G3266HS-B1 seems like as good start as any to see whether its clients bite a curved gaming display The company went with rather moderate specs and judging by the price of the product in Europe it wanted to make its monitor competitive in terms of affordability Does one go for an ultra-high-framerate screen focus more on image quality and colour reproduction Hoping to strike a good balance at the mainstream end of the market is the 27in G-Master GB2770HSU-B1 headline specifications include that 27in panel size Mating IPS with a relatively high refresh rate makes this screen useful for general productivity and gaming - a jack of all trades - though for the discerning buyer with a more powerful graphics card and deeper wallet a QHD version (GB2770QSU) is available for £400 Attaching the three-pronged base to the arm is a matter of tightening one captive screw The matte black finish does a good job of hiding fingerprints The stand provides up to 130mm of height adjustment which is enough to offer portrait mode at the highest setting 18° of upward tilt and 3° downwards is standard and it stays fixed in position firmly the right-hand side has a couple of USB 2.0 ports with the downstream PC connection next to the HDMI and DisplayPort connectors and headphone jack on the bottom of the central block so these are only really useful for plugging in your keyboard and mouse A couple of upward-firing speakers are visible on each side of the central vent so anyone desiring more than rudimentary audio needs to look elsewhere OSD controls are availed through five buttons on the back these feel too high when you come from monitors whose control is usually at the bottom-right The OSD is basic but robust enough to get a decent picture Novice users need to be aware that iiyama ships this model with the FreeSync Premium support turned off by default The only interruption on the front is a circular blue LED that can also be switched off via the OSD Firing the display up brings forth two immediate observations The FHD resolution feels lacking in pixel density for the 27in size especially as we are accustomed to QHD and UHD monitors This is because the panel has a maximum quoted 250 cd/m² brightness considered on the low end for modern screens Don't expect eye-popping visuals or any semblance of HDR but that's mostly understandable given the £230 price point.