PCPOWERPLAY

Asus ROG Bezel Free Kit

Cast an invisibili­ty spell on your bezels.

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IPRICE $240 ONLINE www.rog. asus.com

f you exist in the niche that is triple-screen gaming, you most certainly have that niggling itch inside your brain that bezels suck. And suck they do! Buying monitors with narrow bezels only helps a little bit – they’re still bloody there – two black immersionb­usting lines that you can never de-focus.

But, this! It’s a legit solution with benefits that outweigh the relatively insignific­ant drawbacks. In the box are two 40cm long plastic lenses (so, max monitor size is 27-inch) and a pair of nice spring-loaded brackets to hold the top and bottom in place on your screens. The lenses have two elements, one on each side of a fine line down the middle where they meet. Installati­on is a one minute task, plus a bit of time sitting in your natural gaming position and aligning the centre-line with the area where your bezels meet.

The optical science is simple, the light from the screen behind each lens is refracted towards the middle, and the lenses are angled in a slight V-shape, so the effect is that they stretch the game image inward and over the top of the bezels, making them, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

It works! The bezels are completely masked, creating a lovely sense of super-superwides­creen wraparound gaming. It’s truly transforma­tive in the sense that the objective is to get rid of the black bezels. But we must not expect miracles, and there are a couple of compromise­s. First, the lenses themselves are not invisible – the plastic used is high-tech good stuff with good optical accuracy, but they ‘only’ let 90% of the light through – so you’ll always have a faint reminder they are there.

More noticeable is the slight distortion from the refraction. It’s very minor, though will depend on your bezel thickness – the thinner they are the less this effect is visible. Where you notice it most is in the top and bottom of the screen. As any triple-screen gamer knows, you simply cannot have perfect alignment (with or without this kit) through the full vertical length of the screens. That’s because your eye level should be at the centre point of the screens for any multi-monitor setup, and the alignment will thus always fall away the further up or down you look. Unavoidabl­e, that. The bezel kit magnifies that just a little bit. It’s not a big deal at all if you are a sim racer, because you so rarely look at the top or bottom area of that part of the screen. Flight sims... maybe a little more noticeable, but it’s not a dealbreake­r. Any text directly under the top or bottom is still readable, though, and things like track maps are perfectly fine.

The only other ‘negative’ is the price. Why, you will wonder, are two strips of plastic almost $250? Optics, science, quality materials and R&D, my friends. One could calculate, say, the price difference between 3x monitors and this kit, compared to a 49-inch Samsung screen – but you just plain get more size and curvature with a triple setup. BEN MANSILL

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