What to look for when buying a GAMING MONITOR

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Searching for a gaming monitor can be a pain, between the countless options for size, refresh rate, resolution, added features and more, the manufacturer ‘marketing speak’ and actual quality, it’s a minefield. So, lets dive into what you should actually be looking for, and cut through the BS. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I’m going to break this down into three primary categories; things manufacturers will tell you; things reviewers will tell you; and things you, the buyer, will be interested in. Starting with the manufacturers claims, this is pretty much the spec list so things like the size, resolution, refresh rate, but also the panel type, quoted brightness, colour gamut and response times. You’ll almost always find this on the manufacturers site, under “technical specifications” “specs” “tech specs” or something similar.

For this AOC 24G2U I’ll be doing a follow up video on shortly with the new vs old panel versions, you have to hit “show all specifications”, then you get a list of everything. So, it’s a 23.8” panel, nominally called 24”, it’s a 1920x1080p panel too that can run at up to 144Hz. I’m going to come back to the response time in a sec, but moving down you can see it’s an IPS panel with a WLED backlight. It claims 123% coverage of the sRGB spectrum which is great, and even offers FreeSync Premium with a sync range of 48-144Hz. That means the monitor will adjust when it refreshes to match when the GPU actually has a new frame ready – but only if it’s delivering 48FPS or more, otherwise it will duplicate the frame or potentially lead to tearing.

I held off on mentioning response times as that is quite a crucial factor in how good a panel, and therefore monitor, actually is. The faster it is, the less ghosting you will experience and overall the more responsive it will be. If a panel could only change its pixels every 16ms, it wouldn’t matter if it ran at 1000Hz, you would be experiencing 60Hz – actually likely worse than just running at 60Hz as it would be trying to draw a new frame every millisecond and that wouldn’t end up well. But, point is, you want a nice and fast response time. The trouble is that manufacturers lie. They’d tell you it isn’t lying, and I suppose technically it isn’t a false claim, it’s just deliberately misleading.

Take this 24G2U. Their site claims it has a “1 ms” response time. But in my measurements it was more like 8-10ms. Who’s right? Well, the sneaky bit is what’s in the brackets next to the words “Response Time”, “(MPRT)”. That stands for moving picture response time, and is a different way of measuring response time than you are likely familiar with. You probably know “GtG”, or grey to grey. I personally like black to white, and a separate white to black measure, but MPRT is meant to describe the “perceived level of blur”, rather than the actual panel’s speed, and more importantly the “1 ms” figures very often quoted are based on you using the harshest backlight strobing settings which often aren’t compatible with variable refresh rate options like FreeSync and GSync. I’ll leave an excellent TFT Central article linked in the description if you want to read more on MPRT, but suffice to say it’s deliberately misleading to quote “1 ms” on a monitor that really can’t achieve it.

So that’s what the manufacturer will tell you, what about what you can glean from us reviewers? Well generally, we will test that response time and tell you what our specific sample can achieve. While getting a ‘true’ 1 ms panel is the dream, in reality having 8-10ms on this 24G2U is still plenty fine, as the ghosting (something we will also test) is pretty minimal. It can also be important to test overshoot, an side effect of using overdrive to improve a panels response time as it can cause inverse ghosting and can look just as bad.

We should also test input lag, either as a whole system or from a tool like this time sleuth, again the lower the better there although it’s not 100% paramount you get the absolute lowest. There are a number of other tests that can be run on the panel, from black uniformity to backlight bleed. A site like TFT Central or RTings are your best friends for those in depth details.

You will also find testing on the panel’s colours and brightness, this is important if you are going to be doing any sort of photo or video editing or 3D modelling, as well as gaming. And honestly, a decent panel should still cover close to 100% of the sRGB spectrum for a good content consumption experience too. Finally, we will also test the gaming experience. How it actually feels to play on it, how visible the ghosting is and how the colours and brightness work in games.

The last point to touch on for reviewers is any defects or issues. This is one where customer reviews can be very helpful, as ‘professional’ reviewers only get a single unit in for testing which can be a cherry picked sample rather than the exact same as the wider market would receive. Reviewers can and do find issues, things like backlight bleed especially with IPS panels, but if you find a mass of customer reviews all complaining of a certain issue you’ll work it out before parting with your hard earned cash.

Lastly, there is what you, the buyer, might care about. Added features like adaptive sync – either FreeSync or GSync, although the line between the two is blurred with “GSync Compatible” monitors which are just FreeSync ones ‘validated’ by NVIDIA. Either way, having adaptive sync is an excellent value add for anyone without an RTX 3090. There’s also the other added features like USB hubs, headphone hangers and mouse bungees, extra features like overdrive modes, backlight strobing (if you don’t get headaches from it like I do), and even the variety of inputs. If you like to use your monitor with consoles and a PC, having 2 HDMI ports and a DisplayPort can be useful for example. And a good stand with adjustability and a vesa mount.

I’ve deliberately not touched upon what sort of refresh rate, size and resolution you should be getting – that is up to you, although my personal recommendations would be if you want 1080p, 24” is the largest I’d personally go. 27” 1440p 144Hz IPS displays are the hot new thing right now, there are some incredible and non-bank-breaking options I’ll leave linked below for you to check out, and ultrawides are amazing.