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Monitors · Dell UltraSharp

Dell UltraSharp UP2414Q

6owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
0/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for display; criticized for reliability and software.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like it
I had one, Dell's UP2414Q. It was a piece of shit, mostly due to requiring multi-stream transport to run in 60 hz mode. So you'd get a GPU driver or OS update and the screen would stop working. Sometimes the panel would split in half and one of them would black out or shift its content sideways so there was a seam in the middle and a piece of the edge wrapped around to the center. Would not recommend. The ones afterward that got rid of the MST requirement might've been better. Pixel density was great.
Doesn’t like it
A fun one I once had. I had a monitor early on in the MST days, a Dell UP2414Q. It had a fun firmware bug, where any time it changed resolution while using MST, there was a chance the monitor would crash or do one of several very strange failure modes. In particular, it would sometimes do what I would describe as "crashing" (go black and require physical power cycling to come back), or become confused on what I assume was the state of one of the two "streams" in MST - that is, the left or right "half" of the display would be incorrectly displayed, either by being entirely black, or as though it thought that "half" should be scaled to the entire width of the display, but only for that half. e.g. if we think of the left side as 0-50 and the right as 51-100, sometimes it would only display 0-50's content in 0-50, sometimes it would show 0-50 and the content that should have been 76-100 scaled to the width of 51-100 (e.g. it scaled the right "half" as though it were intended to be the full span of the screen, and then only displayed the portion that would have been visible). My best guess about how that could happen was that the decoding for the two sections was handled independently and there were synchronization bugs. Apparently there's an A01 rev of the monitor that does not suffer from these, but Dell says the FW isn't upgradable, so I ended up trading it to someone else (with full disclosure of the reason I was getting rid of it, ofc).
Likes it
Personally I am a happy cow with my hackintosh able to drive 4k @ 60hz :-) GTX750/UP2414Q with Yosemite
Recommends it
I have the Dell UP2414Q and it is the best display I have ever used! The colors are fantastic as each unit is individually calibrated and checked at the factory. The size of the screen at 24 inches is just right - any bigger and I don't think it would be comfortable for me to use. (for coding primarily) This was the smallest 4k display I could find available at the time. There is only 1 slight problem, the monitor needs to be in DisplayPort 1.2 mode in order to run at 60 hz @ 4k resolution - and 60 hz is required, otherwise the mouse will feel jerky, even though I have a i7 4790 CPU and GTX 780 TI graphics card. The problem is when in DP 1.2 mode and you run a game that uses a lower resolution, the image won't scale to fill the screen. It took a long time (and a lot of frustration) to figure it out, but you need to drop down to DP 1.1 mode - which drops your 4k Windows desktop refresh rate to 30 hz - and then the lower res will scale to fit the screen. It is annoying that you need to do this, but at least it can be done on the fly, ie. about to play a game, then go into the monitor menu and disable DP 1.2, then run the game, no need to reset the computer. Once you are in DP 1.1 mode, games will run full screen at lower resolutions up to 60 hz. Obviously this monitor isn't targeted at gamers.
Recommends it
I'll state at the outset that, provided you have the ability to output using DisplayPort 1.2, you should consider the Dell UP2414Q, which I'm using and really like. Otherwise (and even in this case), you might be happier waiting it out. There were a few caveats that prevented The Wire Cutter from recommending any monitor, but some of those don't seem to apply as readily now as they did at the time of last edit. I got the Dell UP2414Q - a 24" ~4k monitor, making it around 183 ppi. The primary issues The Wire Cutter brought up in their rundown (of this display and generally) seemed to be the following: - price (in this case $1100) - the resolution being too high for the screen space - poor refresh rates (30Hz in this case) On the first point, you can now get it for around $750, maybe less, in the US. The second point was somewhat platform-specific, but on OS X you can tell it to display in HiDPI mode and it'll deal with the resolution in pretty much the same way that it deals with a retina Macbook Pro's 2880x1800 display. Namely, it'll scale everything at 2x. This is idyllic. If you have an rMBP, imagine that kind of sharpness across a 24" display and you're in the right ballpark. The last point, about refresh rates, is trickier. My understanding is that this display has no trouble displaying at 60Hz once you enable it, but I have this display hooked up to a hackintosh, so myriad driver quirks make it impossible for me to say definitively whether the video card, the monitor, or