LG turned its 48-inch OLED TV into a huge 4K gaming monitor

Late last year, I plopped a giant 48-inch OLED television on my desk in search of the one screen to rule them all. It was fantastic, with amazing color, inky blacks, G-Sync, and FreeSync Premium on a 120Hz panel — but not exactly suited to be the

perfect PC screen. Now, LG is tailoring its television a bit more for desk use with the new LG UltraGear 48GQ900, which adds some of the features I wished I had in that review.

Chief among them: the stand. While the LG C1 48 and LG CX 48 televisions featured a big wide base that discourages any attempt at desktop cable management and blocks the rest of your desk from view, the new UltraGear monitor has a more traditional V-shaped foot that lifts the whole screen off the table.

There’s a built-in two-port USB 3.0 hub, an easily-accessible 3.5mm four-pole headset jack if you don’t want to rely on its built-in 20W stereo speakers, and a remote control that might actually make sense for dedicated gaming use. It’s got a big honking dial and easy buttons to change video inputs, audio outputs, mute, power, and a toggle for LG’s Game Mode. (The TVs had, well, a TV remote and no nub underneath to navigate menus.)

The Korean company’s Chinese product page also shows you’ll be able to summon an on-screen crosshair and FPS counter, if you like, which are table stakes for high-end gaming monitors these days. You can also overdrive the screen to 138Hz, though I’m not immediately sure why you’d want to.

What the company’s press release doesn’t say, unfortunately, is whether LG has made its automatic brightness limiter algorithms any less aggressive, which is the thing that kept these giant OLED screens from being amazing do-everything PC monitors in the past. While I found the LG C1 48 excellent for PC gaming, it was a pain to have the screen constantly dimming while trying to scroll documents and websites.