BenQ EX2710Q Review – Fast, Impressive Speakers, Poor brightness

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The 1440p 165Hz IPS monitor market is jam-packed full of impressive and worthwhile options, chief among them has to be the Gigabyte M32Q – but is this, the BenQ EX2710Q, a better option? Is it more deserving of your hard earned cash? Let’s take a look and find out…

The EX2710Q sports the standard specs for a mid range 1440p high refresh rate display, like a 165Hz refresh rate, an IPS panel, DisplayHDR 400, FreeSync Premium, a quoted 95% coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum and a 1ms response time. That all sounds pretty familiar, but there are a few lie-by-omissions there, starting with DisplayHDR 400. I’m honestly not sure how they managed to convince VESA to even let them put that sticker on (as worthless as it is anyway), because the quoted ‘typical’ brightness is just 250 nits, and in my testing the brightest I could make this muster was 238 nits. Now in a darker room that’s more than enough, but if you have a lot of ambient lighting where you game this is unlikely to be the panel for you.

That means that I wouldn’t bother even looking twice at the HDR setting and stick with SDR instead. I should note though, the button on the front labelled “HDRi” doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with HDR. From their own help article, BenQ explain the “HDRi” settings are effectively just a gamma curve adjustment, and when I cycle through the modes.. Yeah that’s it. You are just changing the panel’s gamma curve, a setting you can control manually in the menu – oh and you are also oversaturating blue and green according to their guide as well. Excellent…

The other misleading spec is the “1ms response time” – that is the MPRT or moving picture response time, a calculated-not-measured figure that may as well be an NFT as both have the same level of usefulness in reality. I suppose somewhat to their credit if you visit the specs page for the monitor you’ll find they also list the GtG pixel response time as 2 ms, but even that is misleading at best and it’s buried in the specs page, whereas the 1ms MPRT time is quoted in the title of the monitor, as a key bullet point, on the box, on the product imaging, and all over the main landing page.

The 2ms claim technically isn’t a lie, but to end up with a result that says that, you have to set it to the highest overdrive setting, choose a very small transition and measure from here to here and claim that as the response time. It’s akin to saying your car can do 0-60 in 3 seconds, because you started the timer at 50 mph… In reality the response time, even in its maximum overdrive setting, sits somewhere around 6ms with some pretty poor overshoot which only helps to extend its transition time. Happily, with the overdrive turned down just a single step the results get much better, decreasing the overshoot considerably to the point where it’s going to be fairly hard to notice, and is actually a touch faster overall with an average 5.76ms perceived response time.

The funny thing is that a response time sitting generally between 4 and 6 ms is actually really good, especially for this class of panel. It’s rare to find a display that doesn’t spill well over it’s refresh rate window, something that is reflected in the UFO test where it manages to fully render the frame for around a millisecond before the next frame starts being drawn. While it isn’t absolutely perfect as it takes the entire frametime to complete drawing the image, it’s still noticeably better than a number of even higher priced competitors. BenQ – lead with that, not the purposefully misleading marketing.

Those results should bode well for its gaming performance, and on the whole it does. Even relatively fast motion still looks pretty clear and crisp which means you get a pretty decent experience playing many genres of games. Sure it’s no esports pro display, but it isn’t meant to be and for the more casual gamer the panel offers a fast enough response time for that to not be a bottleneck. The only drawback when it comes to gaming is the input lag. Unlike response time which is how long the panel takes to change colours, input lag is how long the panel takes to process the new frame your GPU sends it, and start displaying it on screen. Using my time sleuth, it reported a relatively slow 5.8ms delay, a stark contrast to the 1ms Gigabyte’s M27Q offers.

Using NVIDIA’s LDAT tool to measure the total system or click-to-photon latency it reported a more respectable 23ms average, after a couple runs. The earlier run averaged more like 33ms with a lot of variability so it isn’t quite perfect. That translates to the occasional missed shot where the display is anywhere between 1 and 5 frames behind the “live” game and the potential for enemies to get a slight advantage when it’s a battle of reaction time. It’s far, far from the worst I’ve seen though, and for the style of monitor it’s perfectly adequate.

One other nice thing about this is the colours – especially in games that aren’t a flat pallet of beige – you get a rather vibrant and rich view. The loud red of the Ferrari F1 car in Assetto Corsa stands out nicely against the deep green grass over the rolling hills of Belgium, and should help distract you from the appalling driving I’m displaying in these clips… Driving with a keyboard is terrible. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

BenQ’s claim of 95% DCI P3 coverage is spot on – actually 1% low, as my SpyderX reported 96% DCI P3 coverage, 90% AdobeRGB and well over 100% of the sRGB spectrum too. Compared to the M27Q, this is clearly aimed squarely at DCI P3, whereas the M27Q is shifted more into the greens, more closely matching the AdobeRGB space instead although still I think overall having a slightly wider colour space by comparison – and for sure better brightness.

For content consumption, chilling watching your obviously favourite tech YouTuber, or, you know something else, the EX2710Q is pretty good. The brightness level, especially in bright rooms, could be a bit of a problem but as long as it isn’t too bright it’s a crisp and vibrant panel and a pleasant viewing experience. Much to my surprise, the front facing dual 2W speakers and the 5W woofer offer a remarkably good listening experience too. Of course they don’t hold a candle to really any dedicated speakers or headphones, but I’ve got to say they are quite possibly the best built-in monitor speakers I’ve heard – barring the Philips Momentum 55’s included soundbar, but that’s basically a TV with an attached soundbar, hardly a fair comparison. They genuinely sound pretty good, and while you do have a headphone jack out for feeding say a console’s audio to dedicated speakers or headphones, these are good enough to use at least casually if you don’t have anything else.

I mentioned consoles there – it’s worth noting this has two HDMI 2.0 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port and a two port USB 3 hub which means while you will be able to connect a PC without issues, if you want to get an Xbox Series X running at 1440p 120Hz you might need to manually adjust the settings as it won’t be connecting over HDMI 2.1, and thus far the PS5 doesn’t support 1440p so it’ll default to 1080p 120Hz which won’t look all that great as 1080p to 1440p isn’t a direct pixel-to-pixel translation.

Finally, if it matters to you at all, it’s rather stylish. I actually really like the look of this from the back, complete with it’s annoying I/O cover plate. The on-screen menu controls are fairly easy to get at down at the bottom right, and the menu itself is pretty easy, complete with the usual game modes and settings, including “AMA” which is BenQ’s name for overdrive, and “Blur Reduction”, aka backlight strobing or black frame insertion. The stand has a pretty large footprint on your desk, but does offer good stability and the usual adjustments like tilt, height, swivel and like 5° of rotation. I’m not 100% sure why they decided to include that, I guess to let you level the panel if your desk isn’t quite flush.

The final thing you should know about this is the price. It’s listed both on BenQ’s own site and on places like Amazon (affiliate link in the description by the way) for £350, putting it around £20 more than the M27Q – and even taking their lowest on-sale prices the M27Q is more like £50 cheaper – and that’s a problem. Options like Acer’s VG271US is currently £280, and is pretty even in its performance across the board. Both of those, and the countless other options in this market, make the EX2710Q pretty hard to justify, having to spend more for the same or worse performance. At £280 or lower I can see this being pretty competitive, but at £350 I’d much rather get an M27Q and save £20 or failing that something like the Acer for £70 less. Of course that is based on UK pricing and availability, but I know it can vary wildly across the world and when you are watching this, so do check out the links to both this and the M27Q in the description down below to check what it’s like for you. Those are Amazon affiliate links that will take you to your local Amazon store where you can see all that good stuff.