Asus VG24VQ Review – ELMB 1080p 144Hz Monitor
ELMB – or Extreme low motion blur, also known as ULMB and a number of other names, is the process of strobing the backlight – turning it on and off quickly – so you get less motion blur in games. That’s pretty much the selling point for this Asus VG24VQ monitor, so lets see if it’s worth it! But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every monday, wednesday and friday!
So, like I said, ELMB is the process of strobing the backlight to reduce motion blur. I recorded some high speed footage of ELMB enabled on this, trigger warning for any epileptic folks by the way, you can see it turns the backlight on for just long enough for your brain to see the image, then turns back off again. When done right, this can give a new level of sharpness and clarity in games, much like old CRT displays, but it’s pretty hard to do well.
Asus have clearly tried here, but it’s not perfect. Thanks to the backlight strobing it can be hard to capture exactly what’s happening on screen with it enabled, so apologies for the black bars, but if I zoom in, you can see the alien’s head and ship is pretty badly ghosted in front and behind, even on the maximum “turbo” mode in the menu. It’s actually a lot cleared with ELMB disabled – as you can see here.
When playing with ELMB enabled on normal, I can’t say it was a glaringly obvious improvement. It felt fairly similar, maybe slightly crisper, but on the full “turbo” mode, it almost immediately gave me a headache and had to stop playing. That might just be me, but still, not great.
While we are talking about the panel, lets do the usual measurements. Input lag (over HDMI anyway, which you can’t enable ELMB on), was pretty standard at around 11ms in the center. The panel’s response time was also decent at around 6ms black to white. Good for a VA panel, but not quite as fast as a good TN. One other weird quirk was that one very certain darker colours, the cursor had a bit of a glow around it, as if it had local dimming zones. Hard to catch on camera and not a very big deal, but something to note.
Colours wise, in its sRGB profile, it covered around 97% of the sRGB spectrum, and 70 or so % of AdobeRGB and DCI P3 spectrums, which isn’t bad for a gaming monitor. The calibration was fairly far off though, so if you do want to use this as say a stream clip editing monitor, maybe pick up a SpyderX and calibrate it first.
What about gaming on it? Well that was pretty good. It was nice and smooth thanks to the high refresh rate, crisp enough considering it’s a 24” 1080p panel, and as long as you are ok with disabling ELMB you can enable Freesync just in case you drop below the 144hz refresh rate. I wasn’t hitting any absolute bangers on it, at least no more than usual anyway, but it felt solid.
So, what else do you get on a premium priced monitor? Well, the usual adjustability in height, tilt, swivel and rotation for portrait mode, should you want that – and surprisingly the viewing angles are good enough that it isn’t a terrible idea – you get 2 HDMIs and a DisplayPort – no USB hub here – and that’s about it. Oh and a pretty tight curve, 1500mm radius.
For the price it’s currently at, it is a little hard to recommend. For £40 less you can get a similarly fast IPS model from AOC, the very popular 24G2U, or for £50 more you can get a 1440p 144hz model, also from AOC in the CQ27G2X, so unless you really want ELMB I don’t see too much of a reason to go for this over the other options. That’s not to say it’s a bad monitor, it’s not at all, pretty good actually, just a little strangely placed in the market.
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TechteamGB Score
