I've started playing my PC on my living room OLED — it's been a game-changing revelation

(Image credit: Future)

Ever since I bought my first apartment a couple of years ago, I’ve exclusively used one of the best gaming PCs in a second bedroom that I converted into a home office. While this has mostly provided a great and peaceful work environment, there has been one big drawback: It’s separated my mega rig from the main TV in my living room.

Previously, at the height of the pandemic when I was forced to shack up with my folks for a year, I had all my gaming kit and the TV I owned at the time (the LG C8 OLED) in my parents’ front living room. My dear old mom never used this space, so that gave me carte blanche to turn it into — and I can feel the grimace on my face growing as I’m about to type this — a proper “man cave”. Ugh.

The distance between my TV and the desk I used to work on was short enough that I could use a couple of monitors to do my job (hooked up to the Nvidia RTX 3090 I owned back then via DisplayPort cables), then use my GPU’s HDMI port and a 12ft HDMI cable to connect my PC to my OLED.

It was the perfect work/play scenario. I would graft away at my job during the day on a couple of fairly average monitors, then I’d play the best Steam games on my 65-inch OLED when quitting time came along.

Skip forward nearly three years, and my main TV and my custom built desktop have never had the chance to tango since. Well, not until this week. But I’ll get to that shortly.

Don’t get me wrong, I realize I’m incredibly lucky to have enough space in my apartment to be able to carve out a home office. And to be clear, the monitors I’m now using are a world away from the displays I worked on back in 2020.

All work and no play

Samsung Odyssey G9 OLED with LG C2 OLED — I'm hardly slumming it with my office setup, but I definitely prefer playing games in my living room. (Image credit: Future)

My dual screen setup is so overkill, one of the panels isn’t even a monitor. Currently, I work across a 49-inch Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 super ultrawide monitor and a 48-inch LG C2 OLED TV. Like I said, “overkill”.

This ludicrous setup is probably the main reason I’m forced to subsist on a diet of non-stop microwave meals. Great priorities, right? Yet as much as I love both of these displays, at the end of the working day, I don’t want to spend anymore time in my office. It’s the main reason I’ve played way less PC games over the last two years.

Thankfully, I’ve found a solution. Albeit one that is definitely going to ruin my shins if I keep doing it every night. I’ve finally started playing my gaming PC on my main living room TV again.

It’s been a revelation.

Now I can play the best PC games from the comfort of a couch again"

Not only does it let me play the best PC games from the comfort of a couch again, it’s also given me the chance to finally pair my ungodly powerful rig (which houses an RTX 4090 GPU and AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU) with my 77-inch LG G3 OLED. And yes, feel free to call me “Mr Microwave Meal” from here on out.

It’s been a transformative experience. I’ve mostly played Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 on my colossal OLED and all that extra screen real estate is a game-changer after a year or so of being “limited” to a 48-inch screen.

For my money, these are two of the best-looking PC games ever made, and thanks to Nvidia DLSS, I can comfortably run both at 4K/120 fps at Ultra settings with ray tracing set to Psycho mode on the former title.

This is going to sound superlative, but it feels like going from flying on the first Wright Brothers plane to traveling first class on Concord… back when that modern miracle of aviation was still a thing.

The sheer size of my LG G3 compared to my office C2 has made my recent gaming sessions on PC so much more cinematic. Throw in the fact the G3 is basically the best and brightest OLED TV in the world, and the massive boost to image vibrancy (we’re talking 1,361 nits of peak HDR brightness compared to the 800 nits of the C2), is yet another definition of a total game-changer.

Living (room) the dream

Red Dead Redemption 2 on LG G3 OLED — (Image credit: Future)

The practicalities of using a desktop from your couch aren’t as difficult as you’d think, either. All I have to do is plonk my little Logitech MX Keys Mini wireless keyboard and Logi MX Master 3S wireless mouse down on my coffee table, and I’m good to go.

I should add a final couple of cautionary notes to this mostly celebratory experiment before I wrap things up, though. Firstly, the combined floor space my TV cabinet and huge desktop take up has meant I’ve had to move my poor husky’s crate from the corner of my living room into my hallway these past few nights.

Suffice to say, I’ve been on the end of a lot of Siberian stink eye since.

I’m pretty sure my spine is going to shatter the next time I have to pick my PC up"

Also, I’m pretty sure my spine is going to shatter the next time I have to pick it up and take it on what feels like the equivalent of a 20km hike to my living room. That thing has some serious chonk factor going on.

I don’t know how much it exactly weighs, but I’d guess at least 10 times as much as my PS5. Though please don’t overly trust my shaky math.

I’ve had such a blast playing my PC on my main TV, I'm definitely going to make it, if not a nightly routine, then definitely something I do every weekend. Even if the heavy lifting involved is definitely going to snap my back, Bane on Batman style.

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Dave is a computing editor at Tom’s Guide and covers everything from cutting edge laptops to ultrawide monitors. When he’s not worrying about dead pixels, Dave enjoys regularly rebuilding his PC for absolutely no reason at all. In a previous life, he worked as a video game journalist for 15 years, with bylines across GamesRadar+, PC Gamer and TechRadar. Despite owning a graphics card that costs roughly the same as your average used car, he still enjoys gaming on the go and is regularly glued to his Switch. Away from tech, most of Dave’s time is taken up by walking his husky, buying new TVs at an embarrassing rate and obsessing over his beloved Arsenal.