Gaming Monitor Setup Guide

I’ve reviewed over 100 monitors, and yet I’ve never actually talked through how to set one up, so let’s do that! The first thing when setting up a monitor is physically setting it up. Most monitors these days come in three parts, the panel, the stand, and the foot. You can use the thumb screw to attach the foot to the stand, then usually you can just clip the panel onto the stand as they are almost always toolless. Sometimes you’ll need a screwdriver, but that’s pretty rare.

With the monitor assembled, you can adjust the height, tilt and swivel to suit your position. Ideally the monitor will be in line with your eye level so you don’t have to tilt your neck downwards. Next are the connections – power obviously, although some monitors have a dedicated switch next to the power input you’ll need to switch on. Then the display cable. Depending on what device you are connecting, you might use HDMI or DisplayPort. Personally if you are using your monitor with a PC, I’d recommend using DisplayPort. It’s generally more supported and stable for things like Adaptive Sync. For consoles you generally don’t have a choice but to use HDMI. If your monitor has a USB hub, you might want to connect the downlink cable. That’s normally a USB B port and the cable should come in the box.

With your system connected and running, you’ll want to head into the on screen menu and start tweaking the settings. The biggest one is anything called “overdrive” or “response times”, because that’s what turns your panel from a slow mush of colours to a sharp and responsive gaming powerhouse. As a general rule, the second highest option, often called “Medium”, is normally the best balance. It’s always good to check reviews for your monitor – or maybe by the time you watch this video you’ll be able to use my new response times database site. As soon as that’s live I’ll link it at the top of the description for you to check out!

One mode I personally like to avoid is the backlight strobing mode. It gets called a lot of things, AOC calls it “MBR”, Asus calls it “ELMB”, Gigabyte calls it “Aim Stabilizer”, and some call it “ULMB”. Basically it just turns the backlight off for all but the first millisecond of a new frame. It dims your display quite a bit since there is now about seven times less light being emitted, and personally it gives me headaches almost instantly. You’ll often find that you can’t enable it at the same time as adaptive sync, which is a setting I’d highly recommend you do enable. It makes your gaming experience a lot better thanks to syncing when to display new frames with your graphics card (or console), so you don’t get any torn frames showing up on screen. You might also have a setting for “Low Input Lag” – if you can enable that, definitely do!

Your monitor likely has “Game Modes”, these are mostly just colour profiles rather than any game specific settings. It doesn’t hurt to use them, although often the standard mode ends up being the most colour accurate and in my experience normally offers the best all round experience. You might also get some gaming features though, like FPS counters, on screen crosshairs, or if you bought an NVIDIA Reflex monitor, a latency analyser. The FPS setting can be interesting, although I’d argue in game ones are better as they actually reflect what FPS your game runs at, instead of just what your monitor is receiving which will cap at your refresh rate. Crosshairs can be useful, although in pro leagues I think it’s considered cheating, so I’ll leave that up to you.

You might want to adjust the brightness, contrast and gamma settings to suit your environment. In a brighter room you’ll want to increase the display’s brightness to a comfortable level, but if you are mostly using it in the dark, a much lower brightness is better. Gamma settings basically shift the curve of how bright darker colours are. The default setting is normally around gamma 2.2, which is generally what’s best, although feel free to adjust it to what looks best to you. The same goes for the colour settings, both colour temperature and any colour balancing you might want to do. Most monitors I test these days don’t need much tweaking here. The “warm” profile is normally default, and is generally the most true-to-life option.

You might also have HDR modes. Again this is something I tend to leave off personally, as most displays that aren’t OLEDs generally don’t offer a good HDR experience. There are a few mostly high end exceptions for sure, but on your average gaming display with an IPS panel, no full array local dimming and like 300 nits of peak brightness, enabling HDR in any form just makes everything look worse – at least in my opinion. Still, the option is often there if you do fancy it.

Something I’ve seen become more common recently is monitors that use the USB hub cable and software in Windows to control the monitor’s on-screen settings. A few different brands offer it, and it’s actually pretty handy. AOC’s G-Menu here can control the majority of settings you’d find in the on-screen menu – everything from the overdrive mode to colour temperature and brightness. While you don’t tend to tweak those settings all that regularly, it is nice to have everything be available to control over software.

There are a few things you’ll definitely want to do in Windows too, like making sure your monitor is set to run at its full refresh rate. Open Windows display settings, set the correct resolution if it hasn’t done it already, then scroll to “Advanced Display Settings”. From there you should have a drop down to change your refresh rate to the maximum. You can also check adaptive sync is enabled in your graphics driver. Right click on your desktop and you should have an option for either NVIDIA control panel, or AMD Radeon Settings. With an NVIDIA card, go to “Set up G-SYNC” and enable it for your monitor. On an AMD card, click “Display”, then enable FreeSync as the first option there. If you have an AMD GPU, you might also want to enable Radeon Anti-Lag, a useful tool in reducing input lag in games. NVIDIA’s alternative, Reflex, is built into the games themselves so you’ll want to enable that on a per-game basis.

I think that’ll do for now, but if you have any of your own tips you think people should know about, drop them in a comment below!