Advice for 40 inch web dashboard?

[DavidA]

My company makes mobile games and we have technologies like Google Analytics to anonymously track data. Where people are playing, how long they're playing for, etc. Basically it's a web page that automatically updates.

I'd like to display this information on a large screen in the office, but I can't decide the best way of doing this.

40 inch, 4K Philips monitor? This screen looks great and seems a bargain at £550, but it has no speakers which might be handy. Also, what would I plug it into?

40 inch, 1080p Samsung TV? £500. Lower resolution and not designed for displaying web pages, but comes with speakers.

In either case, I need to plug it into something. An Apple TV would be useful and easy for connecting to Macs (and iPhone) via streaming, but wouldn't support 4K. Presumably there aren't any 4K streaming systems yet? Are there small form factor PCs, such as the NUC, that will output at 4K?

Any advice appreciated.

[Ttaskmaster]

IMO, if you're getting a screen that big, you'd be better off with an external sound system anyway. Integral speakers on these things are usually pretty crap.
But if your final choice comes with speakers, you cal always just mute them...

Plugging it in - If it's a web page you need displaying, just about anything that is internet-capable will do. You could choose a standalone PC, connect it as a second display to an existing PC, use an Android box... many ideas.
Depends entirely if you want to use it for other things as well, such as presentations, films, displaying your games etc.

If it's just the web page you want showing, then the TV might be the cheaper option.
I don't actually watch TV myself (or even own one), but I know some do come with web browsers now. So long as the webpage doesn't require a load of plugins or anything to display the content, it may well work.

[DavidA]

Thanks of the reply. I don't think we'll ever use it to watch TV or movies. We sometimes do presentations from our Mac laptops or Airplay from our iPhones, so that's why I thought of an Apple TV. I guess a Mac Mini streaming a webpage via Airplay to an Apple TV, plugged into the TV would be a solution.

But the 4K display would be nice since we're showing a webpage. Do you know of any small form factor PCs that output 4K?

[Ttaskmaster]

But the 4K display would be nice since we're showing a webpage. Do you know of any small form factor PCs that output 4K?

Nothing pre-built, but only because I don't look at those.

AFAIK, it mostly comes down to which graphics card you have.
An R9 290X should cope with 4K, as should most other flagship cards from both AMD and Nvidia. Either way, you're probably looking at something fairly high end.

It then comes down to finding the smallest case that your chosen GPU wil fit in, while remaining cool. I assume you'll be using air cooling over water?


I would ask whether you actually *need* a 4K screen, though... Most people will be a fair distance from this screen, at which point the ultra-sharp details will probably start getting lost. If you just want something big to display a webpage, then 1440p or even 1080p may be sufficient.

[EndlessWaves]

Most web pages are designed for lower resolutions and don't scale that well so a 3840x2160 screen may not be that much of a benefit initially.

3820x2160@60hz output support is pretty robust via DisplayPort these days. There seem to be some question over whether a lot of Intel's processors support it on non-composite displays but the high end ones like the Iris Pro found in Gigabyte's Brix Pro do, as do most AMD and nVidia chips.

HDMI is more limited, as far as I know only the GTX 970 & 980 support it.

If you're not displaying anything that requires high frame rates and the screen supports it then you may be able to run it at 30hz instead of the usual 60hz, which requires less bandwidth and is more widely supported over DisplayPort and HDMI.

[DanceswithUnix]

If it is just a web page, then a smart TV or something like a ChromeCast is surely the easiest and cheapest solution?

I can't see 4K really helping that much tbh. A cheap Android tablet on an HDMI cable can do 1080p happily.