Acer XB273U NV Review – 27” 1440p 170Hz Agile-Splendor IPS Gaming Monitor

This is Acer’s XB273U NV, a 27 inch, 1440p 170Hz Agile-Splendor IPS gaming monitor. Wait, “Agile-Splendor”?? What… what’s that? If you’ve never heard this term before – don’t worry, you’re not alone. A bit of searching will tell you “Agile-Splendor” is a marketing term Acer coined to class their fast, wide colour gamut coverage IPS panels, I think in a similar way to Asus’ laptop division calling their displays “ROG Nebula Displays”. So, the main factor here is the “1 ms response time” – that’s in quotes because, well, it isn’t 1ms. In the only overdrive mode available with adaptive sync enabled, “Normal”, you get an average of just shy of 6ms with functionally no overshoot. That means that the vast majority of possible transitions are within the refresh rate window, which is actually really good.

If you disable adaptive sync, you can switch to the “Extreme” overdrive mode if you really want. I’m not sure WHY you’d want to, considering it basically just turns every transition into an overshooting mess, for a relatively small improvement in performance. So, best to keep adaptive sync on and overdrive on “Normal”. Just to show you what “Extreme” looks like, this is it on the UFO test. Yeah, this is really bad. I’m not sure why Acer wouldn’t have taken the time to properly tune this mode to provide a much lower level of overshoot, but the “normal” mode does work fine so it’s hardly a big deal.

The good news is that the combination of good motion performance, the 170Hz refresh rate and the 2560×1440 resolution, this is a pretty great gaming experience. It feels smooth, responsive and crisp. While I’m terrible at CSGO, especially when playing with a keyboard and mousepad balancing in my lap like 6 feet from the display, I still really enjoyed playing on it. Even the input lag is great, with my time sleuth reporting just 1.3ms of on display latency, and NVIDIA LDAT reporting a respectable 24ms average, so a good shout all round.

The sticker right next to the “Agile-Splendor IPS” one also suggests a great content creation experience, as while I can’t find any specific claims on Acer’s site for this model, generally that “Color Accuracy” sticker denotes a DeltaE of under 2 – the limit of the human eye’s perception for colour. Sadly for Acer, my SpyderX reported a little over 2, around 2.4. That’s still great, and with a calibration it’s spot on, but at least my model out-the-box wasn’t sub 2. It does cover over 90% of the DCI P3 spectrum though, which is excellent. That should mean that anything from content creation to content consumption should look great.

I say should, because there is one issue that might be a deal breaker for you. This will only run at 200 nits at max brightness. Yeah… That’s low, even for a budget laptop display, let alone a premium 1440p gaming monitor. They claim it’ll do 400 nits, which is much better, but that’s in HDR only and as best as I can tell that’s only on a small window size. The best I could measure was a little over 200 nits on half the screen. That means if you use this screen in a bright room, it gets easily overpowered and washed out. For a dark room this is perfectly fine so for a lot of people it won’t be an issue, but it is worth knowing before you smash that buy button.

Some other bits you should know, you get two HDMI ports alongside one DisplayPort, plus a USB 3 hub with two downward facing ports and two poking out the left hand side. The stand has all the adjustability you’d expect, everything from tilt, swivel, height adjust and even rotation to stick the panel in portrait mode if you wanted. The on screen menu is controlled by a little hat-switch along with three buttons above it. Everything is laid out as you’d expect, with options for everything from gamma to a backlight strobing mode if you really want.

While I can’t find exact pricing for this model – Acer’s naming scheme makes that rather difficult as there are 16 different “XB273” models for you to choose from, but from what I can see this sits at about the same or more than the Gigabyte M27Q-X, their newer 240Hz 1440p IPS option, which I’d have to recommend instead especially since that can hit 450 nits in SDR which is much more reasonable, plus of course the faster refresh rate is always nice. Still, I think if you end up with the XB273U NV, as long as you don’t need the brightness, I think you’ll have a pretty good time with it. It games well, and in the right environment looks good for content consumption and creation.