I've only had this monitor for a few days now, but so far it has been amazing. I do have a good old list of pro's and con's so far though, and here are my thoughts:
Pro's:
-240Hz!!!!!!!!!!! (You knew this had to be here.)
-G-sync is amazing, and paired with the 240Hz it's so smooth I have trouble leaving my wife alone in the room with it.
-The bezel is thinner than my wallet after buying this thing.
-The panel is great. For a TN panel it has good colors and view angles, but of course it will never compete with a VA or IPS panel in these departments. I won the lottery and had not a single dead pixel on arrival, looks great!
-Aesthetics are always going to be subjective, but I like the AW features on this monitor, it stands out, there's no doubt of it's AW heritage, but it isn't slapping me in the face with it and looks clean (looking at you Asus ROG and Acer Predator).
-Build quality is tops. None of the plastics feel cheap and all the metal construction adds to the premium feel.
Neutral:
-The build quality comes at a cost...weight and bulk. This thing is fairly hefty and I'm certain I would have thrown a tantrum trying to wire and mount this baby if it weren't for the 90° rotation on the stand (and bear in mind this is only a 25" monitor).
-It's expensive. This is not a negative though in my humble opinion. G-Sync modules are a premium that makes the cost of a monitor shoot through the roof. This is not Dell/AW's fault, merely a fact of life (currently) and if you want absolute top end and flawless performance, you need to get an Nvidia GPU and a G-Sync monitor. This monitor is priced right along with others in it's class and quality (Acer Predator has a TN panel, 1440p, 144Hz that is similar in price, and Asus has at least one monitor that also has the same feature set as the AW2518H for around the same price). So again, not a negative point to me, given the state of things, but worth talking about.
-The OSD and other menu features are great, they work, are self-explanatory, and do what they need to do. I would have greatly preferred some kind of multi-directional switch similar to other monitors in this class and price-point though.
-240Hz is amazing, as I've said. But, to run this monitor at it's full potential you need a top end GPU to take advantage of those delicious frames (think at a minimum a GTX 1080 and preferably a 1080Ti or RTX 2080). That's not to say that this can't be run on a lesser card, My wife's system (which currently runs a GTX 1070) still works well with it, thanks to G-Sync. Whether she is in the mid double-digit frames per second or blazing at a little over 200, it's always smooth as butter. So TL;DR: don't expect the 240Hz to be fully realized without a top end GPU.
Con's:
-Can we all take a moment to give the design team a round of applause for the top-notch build quality? I know I've mentioned it in all three categories now, but seriously this thing is a tank. However, you guys seriously over did the stand. It's massive. Don't get me wrong, I can shake the desk like it owes me money and that monitor doesn't move a millimeter. It has a nice layer of a type of silicone rubber under the stand that sticks to my tempered glass desktop like glue. But it also covers a serious amount of real estate. We're talking enough to land a SpaceX rocket on. I replaced my wife's old 24" Asus monitor with this, and within 20 or 30 minutes of gameplay after tweaking the settings and getting the colors and stuff where she liked it we had to completely reorganize her desk to accommodate this behemoth of a stand because she kept banging her mouse on it.
To be fair to Alienware/Dell, this monitor is a 5-star that only loses it's perfection status to it's overly bulky stand. I'm sure that the shape could be changed to make it more desktop-friendly without sacrificing stability.
Otherwise you folks made an amazing monitor.
| Standing screen display size | 25 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 Pixels |
