(NEW) Samsung 49" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NA Gaming Monitor

I'm using a Neo G9 49 inch quantum mini led, I've had this one for 6 months, as of one month ago 2/1/2024 the firmware is up to date. I have been through 3 of theses monitors as the first 2 had the same problems of my 3rd but did them worse. It is very clearly market as a gaming monitor, the problem is the curve is odd and the freesync/g-sync (VRR) is awful. As a productivity monitor the curve feels odd, but ok. The HDR is terrible(might just be windows) and the colors a bit off so it's not a great reference for photo/video work. The SDR is much better and pretty bright, but then you can really only use it for SDR content. DO NOT USE THIS ON A RECORDING PC, thermal expansion popping sounds will be a nightmare. First the freesync/g-sync (VRR). Its bad, it does technically work BUT when the fps drops much below 70 for me I get a very muted flicker/dimming that happens at a about 3 to 5 flickers a second. This is more than enough to be a very bad trigger for me with migraines and can even set off a tiny bit of motion sickness depend on the frequency of the dimming and game. Second "thermal expansion" popping. People like to say this is from the monitor heating up and cooling down, mostly based on brightness and refresh rate. I have no doubt that's what causes the sound but I have never had any other monitor make sounds liker this! Design better! This is the main reason I returned the first 2 they would "pop/click" from the left side of the screen every 10 seconds or so. I tried lowering the refresh to 120, tried turning off HDR, tried turning the brightness down, made sure there wasn't any sunlight heating up the screen and air flow was good. If I did ALL of those things it would just make the pops happen every minute or so instead. The third monitor would only pop once or twice about 5 minutes after being first turned on and that was it, so I thought I was good, minor annoyance I have to wait for thew warm up but doable!...nope, after about 4 months its now popping about every 20 seconds. If you have a good mic depending on the pickup pattern(omni, super cardioid) it will pick up the sound and raise the sound floor of your recording space. For a reference I would put it at about 1.5 to 2 times the sound level of a stock clicky keyboard(blue mechanical switches). I can actually hear it while watching talking style youtube videos with open back headphones. Third, the HDR, I've found it looks pretty good in games with HDR set to dynamic. If it wasn't for the VRR problems this would be a good implementation of HDR for games even if the colors are a bit off(this is after a calibration). Standard HDR, what I would use for any photo editing or video work, is very bad. the brightness is low, edges blur a bit, every thing looks a touch washed out. Again this might be a windows thing, but I've seen and used other LED monitors that do it much much better. Last, the curve. Is this a gaming monitor or a productivity one? This bit has mostly subject with some objective things. Its a 1000R curve which would be great for gaming(I personally like 800R) but! It's only 1000R at the center third of the screen. The left and right thirds of the screen are nearly flat splitting the screen equally Left|Center|Right and completely flat for the left and right 1/4's of the screen if you look at it as L|C|C|R division. This curve style is not a bad idea for a productivity monitor, but then you'd only want a 1800R curve for the center section, as you'd want the 2 sides of the screen to be flat so as to not warp the view of the image compared to how a flat screen would see it. Minor annoyances. Coming from an LG ultra wide, the menus seem to be laid out a bit odd, and don't give me nearly as much control over the settings with HDR, for SDR I get about the same control as the LG, but much harder to get to, everything important is buried in the osd menu. Why the hell is there no on screen fps counter, again this is marketed as gaming monitor, I like to use them to make sure the monitor is actually doing VRR right! and it is normally more accurate then using a software solution. The monitor is plugged into my comps usb but there's is no software to adjust settings or mess with calibration? Also you HAVE TO update firmware with a usb flash drive. What's the point of the driver and software downloads? Seems like an easy addition. I have had other much cheaper monitors that can do this, that's why this bugs me so much, for the price they msrp'ed these at, some extra usable features should be there! And no the light core does not count, that's just a rgb/gamer markup.