UPERFECT GR19BU 19 Inch 4K QLED Gaming Monitor Reviewed by Ryan Retro

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Ryan Retro Channel. Look at this. Here's my Nintendo Switch 2, and here is my monitor. All I'm going to do is connect one single USB-C cable to the Nintendo Switch 2 like this. It's going to start charging the battery, and it's going to connect to the monitor at 4K 60 Hz.

No dock required whatsoever, just one cable between the Switch and the monitor. And then a second cable, of course, to power the monitor and the Switch as well. That's it. Usually, you'd have to take the Nintendo Switch 2 dock, connect an AC adapter to the dock for power, connect an HDMI cable to the dock as well, and connect that to your monitor.

Then you have to put your Switch into that dock, and then you can play 4K 60 or 120 Hz while charging. But with the UPERFECT GR-19BU monitor, we don't need the dock. We don't need these cables. We just only need one single USB-C cable, and that's going to charge it, connect it, dock it, just like that, and you're ready to go. Let's get into it.

Unboxing, Design, and Accessories

What’s Included in the Box

We get here a little charging brick. This is a US charging brick, so no good for me here in Korea, but any regular charging brick will work fine for this. It is a GAN power adapter, which is really nice. It keeps it nice and small, but any 20 W or higher charger brick will be fine.

First of all, we have this regular size HDMI to mini HDMI. Because this being a portable monitor, it uses a mini HDMI rather than the full fat one. So, getting the cable right in the box is super helpful.

We then also get this high quality high speed USB-C cable, which as you can see on it says 4K Ultra HD. So, this is ready to go. And as you can see, it says it supports up to 100 watts, 10 gigabit per second, 4K 144 hertz from this one cable. So, this is going to be our magic cable.

We then have one more smaller, thinner USB-C cable. And this one is for power only. This one is just to charge the monitor, so you can connect this to the power brick that it comes with or any good high quality power brick to charge the monitor.

We also get three 180° adapters so that we can route cables really neatly.

Lastly, we get some screws if you'd like to attach this to a VESA mount because we do have the VESA mounting plate on the back. And a really cool stand I'll also show you very, very soon. L

Design, Kickstand, and Connectivity

Let's focus in on the monitor itself now, which is a 19-in panel with very thin bezels.

On the back you'll see my fingerprints everywhere because I've been using this a ton since I got this a few weeks ago. So, we have this lovely stand on the back. It's really strong, a big kickstand so that you can easily set the monitor down. And it goes all the way from completely flat to pretty much any angle you could want.

So, it's really easy to set this up and just start playing games on it, watching TV, whatever you're going to do with your monitor, it's really simple without needing any extra accessories. It just sits there beautifully.

If I move that stand all the way to the top, I can now show you the ports that we have on the side. So, we have that mini HDMI port here and then two USB-C ports.

These can be used for just charging the monitor or for video as well. If you're using a high speed video cable like the one provided, you can plug that directly into your handheld and get the video directly on the screen with that cable.

On the other side we have an OTG connector, a headphone jack, and buttons to control the monitor. We have up, down, back, menu, and power button.

Optional Magnetic Stand and Carrying Accessories

So, if we open this up and take a little look, it's this folded up stand here, which has almost kind of like a MagSafe connector, but much stronger in order to support a big monitor like this.

So, first of all, we need to put this metal plate on the back so that we can attach the magnet. And we can do that with just these four thumb screws that come with the portable stand.

It's super easy to just screw these in with your thumbs. No tools required. And once that's in place, we now have a nice area for the magnet to clip onto.

So, here is our stand, which is very, very strong, and we can maneuver it into the place we want and move that magnetic puck into position. Let's set it up something like that.

Now, if I just align this square with the circular puck, it will clamp really strongly into place like that.

This is really strong, so you can really make it very tall. So, if you can excuse all the mess I've got over there right now, the cables and accessories, we've now got this really high stand that the monitor sits on.

It's just wonderful. And because it's really high, you can even rotate it and turn it into a vertical stand. It's just freely adaptable, so simply, even with one hand like that. It sticks strongly on the magnet. This is really, really cool.

There's the simple sleeve case like you'll be familiar with, so you can just slide the monitor inside there.

It'll be nicely protected, and you can just carry it like this. It's nice and lightweight, or you can put it inside a bigger bag. It's even big enough to fit the Nintendo Switch 2 inside as well.

And they do have one more bag option, which is actually a full big backpack. It's got one of those typical laptop sleeves inside, but this one's big enough for the 19-in monitor.

So, if you're picking up the monitor and you think you might want to take it somewhere now and again, this could be a really good option to bundle with it.

Nintendo Switch 2: Dock-Free USB-C Gaming

So, when it comes to hooking up the monitor to your devices, as I showed in the beginning of the video with the Switch 2, all you need is, of course, a power cable for the monitor itself, which you can plug into either of the Type-C connectors on the back.

So, firstly, let's connect my Nintendo Switch 2 again, just like I did in the beginning of the video, by plugging in that one single video cable to the Switch 2 and the other end to the Type-C of the monitor.

And if we navigate through the settings of the monitor using the buttons on the back, there's actually a dedicated Switch menu option.

So, by changing this to Switch 2, this will set the re solution to 4K 60 and charge the Switch 2 while you're using it. It basically just docks the Switch 2 in 4K 60 without needing the dock, which I think is wonderful.

Now, you might notice over here the cables are kind of wrapping around a little bit, which doesn't look the best, but that is why we have those included 180° adapters.

So, instead of having the cables sticking out the left-hand side of the monitor like this, we can disconnect those cables for now and connect these 180° adapters like this.

Then when we plug in the cables like so, we can lie the monitor down, those cables can neatly come out and go somewhere else, and we have nothing protruding out of the edges.

Gameplay, Picture Quality, and Sound

So, let's start with a beautiful-looking 4K game like Breath of the Wild Nintendo Switch 2 edition. The monitor also does have stereo speakers built in, too.

So you can hear everything as I'm playing, but monitors like this generally don't have the best sound. The speakers here are certainly serviceable.

They get loud. They're some of the best speakers I've heard of in a monitor, but they're still monitor speakers, so they're not going to be the absolute best, but certainly serviceable. 

Let's just pay this guy a visit and jump on his big belly. Wakey, wakey. Probably not my best idea, but luckily he can't swim. So this is 4K 60, and this looks really beautiful, especially considering the fact that we don't need to use the dock. We just use a cable.

This is Sayonara Wild Hearts, which has a banging soundtrack, which sounds really nice through the speakers, but it also runs at 120 Hz 1440p.

So it's a great way to see the smoothness of the screen. Now unfortunately, my camera shoots in 30 FPS, so it might be hard to see.

Take it from me, it looks really smooth. This monitor is also QLED, so it's more contrasty and punchy than a regular LCD screen. It's not quite OLED, but it is 1200 to 1 contrast ratio, which means it is very contrasty and punchy and looks really great.

I really wish YouTube let us upload at 120 FPS so that I can show you how smooth this looks. It looks beautiful. It's just so fluid.

Even my favorite Nintendo Switch game of all, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, looks beautiful on here. This is the Nintendo Switch 2 edition, so it's 4K. It looks so sharp and crisp.

And for anyone who watched my Nicsy Hyperion 3 Ultra video where I was trying to invite Sydney to my home, I'm happy to announce that she's here. She came and moved into my town, and I'm so happy she's back. Come on, Sydney, turn around.

Look at the camera. Face the audience. She's shy and busy eating her sandwich. Anyway, she's here. So, whether you want to play games in 4K 60 or 1440p 120 Hz, you can do both with this monitor while charging the Switch too with just that one singular USB-C cable between them, which I think is extraordinary and really the killer feature of this monitor.

Using the GR19BU with a PC and Retro Handhelds

PC Gaming via HDMI

We could take the Nintendo Switch 2 out for now and give it a little rest. And I'm now going to use the HDMI cable. So, I'm going to plug in the 180° HDMI adapter to keep things nice and clean.

So, here I am in Batocera on my computer connected to the monitor just using this like a regular computer monitor, which of course we can do.

And with the stand that I showed earlier, it actually makes a pretty good solution for a computer monitor or at least maybe a second monitor next to your main one.

So, I'm able to jump into something like Slay the Spire nice and easily and use it just like I would any monitor with the option to run this up to 4K 144 Hz.

USB-C Handheld Gaming and Dual-Screen PlayRetroid

And because we have that USB-C port which supports USB video output, we can again just use one single cable to connect to the Retroid Pocket Nova or whatever Retroid AYN, AYN Neo you might be using and then connect the other side to the monitor.

And we can run 4K 60 Hz from our Retroid Pocket Nova.

I'm using my Jump front end here. So, the top screen and the bottom screen work together here. You can go through your media on the bottom screen and then see more about it on the top screen. You can of course open your app drawer, go into any of your apps. So, let's jump into a game of Sonic for example.

And here I've got Sonic up on the big screen looking absolutely beautiful with a shader I've put on here to add some little dots to the the give it more of a retro vibe.

Again, the sound quality is really nice, it looks beautiful. And then on the bottom screen, because I'm using my jump front end, I can continue to just freely look through other games and launch them.

Running the Monitor on Handheld Power

You can also take the power cable completely out of the equation, remove the power cable from the monitor, but then you will see there's low power detected, which means it will be a little bit dark. Because we're now running the whole monitor off of our handheld.

So, this is doable if you just want to have the monitor, the handheld, and one single cable, you can actually do this, but it's going to be a bit dark, and you're going to drain the battery of your handheld pretty quickly if you're running the monitor off of it.

But, if you were curious if you can do it, yes, you can. It's just going to be a bit dark, and I wouldn't recommend doing this because of the battery drain. But, if you're in a pinch and you don't have any way of getting power, you can just use one single cable and do a little bit of gaming like this, which I think is pretty cool.

Final Verdict

So, overall, what do I think about the GR19BU from UPERFECT ? I think it's brilliant. I think it's so useful. The sound is surprisingly good for the portable monitor.

The video is visually beautiful. Having both 4K and 144 Hz is incredible. The screen being a QLED looks punchy, contrasty, and lovely.

And that killer feature is the way that you can connect not only just a retro handheld like a Retroid Pocket Nova with one single USB-C cable, but the fact that you can also connect a Nintendo Switch 2 with one singular USB cable while charging the battery, that's something I've never seen before.

So, I'd say thank you to UPERFECT for sending this out to me. I'll continue to use this for sure. And it gets a high recommendation from me.