MSI’s NEW 1440p 144hz CURVED Gaming Monitor
|Much like Gigabyte’s recent attempts to break into the 1440p 144hz monitor market, MSI has a new offering they say is the best of the best, and worth your rather reasonable £400.
The 1440p 144hz monitor market has some fierce competition, so what makes this one stand out? Well, first off it’s a VA panel. Now you may be thinking, wait, VA? Isn’t that awful? In this case, no. You have under 5ms of panel lag, between 33 and 38ms of total system input lag (measured with a mouse with an LED to the first frame of a gun firing in CSGO), AND amazing viewing angles, seriously look at the side to side viewing angles here, and the verticals, it’s actually pretty impressive, especially for an 1800R curved monitor.
It also boasts great colours too, with over 80% of the DCI P3 spectrum by volume, and while it only has a peak brightness of 400 nits, that’s enough for the low end HDR if you want that. It is certainly a nice viewing experience, HDR or not.
You will be glad it’s got such good viewing angles, because the stand that it comes with doesn’t exactly scream ‘amazing’. You’ve got some tilt and a bit of height adjust, but no swivel or rotation, so not perfect, but it’s a rather stable mount which means no screen wobble, and you can mount it to a VESA stand with the included VESA mount.
It wouldn’t be 2019 without some RGB so this thing has it, it has controllable “Mystic Light” LEDs on the back which as always are nice enough, but since most people have their monitor against a wall, they are mostly pointless.
We can’t talk about a gaming monitor and not talk about the gaming experience, which is actually really nice. It’s smooth and responsive, and especially with a higher end GPU is a compelling experience that I would say is worth the price tag. It’s a Freesync display, but supports GSYNC as well meaning anyone can buy this and enjoy the variable refresh rate goodness.
So how does it stack up against the competition? Well, it’s got a much faster panel than the IPS one in the Gigabyte AD27QD, while still having brilliant colour accuracy, and for £135 less, it makes this look like a bargain.
For me this really is an impressive bit of kit, and hats off to MSI for making a worthwhile entry in the crowded space that is 1440p 144hz monitors. Of course there are some monitors that will be better than this in certain areas, but this really is a great jack of all trades monitor that gets a big thumbs up from me.