This monitor is hands down the best part of my gaming setup now. I'll go over every single thing about the monitor, from someone who's in between a casual and hardcore gamer. I personally have had zero issues with the monitor so far. The package was a little wet and therefore the monitor had a little water on the outside, but thankfully, nothing was damaged. I really don't blame ASUS as it isn't really their responsibility to keep their package waterproof from the pouring rain. However, I completely place all blame on USPS for almost ruining my outstanding monitor. The only issue besides that is slight flickering that happens towards the top left of the screen when changing between fullscreen apps and stuff like that. It isn't every time you transition into a fullscreen application and it isn't super noticeable either. It's actually quite rare and never happens while I'm actually playing in game. A little sub-issue with the flickering is that I went to change my text size in the display section of my control panel to large, the screen would go into a constant flickering. I didn't want to mess anything up so I just immediately went back to small size instead of large. I'll go over what it's like to come from a 60hz monitor to what I think is probably the best you're ever gonna get with gaming monitors.
First of all, change your desktop resolution and refresh rate as soon as you get the monitor! I've heard some people are getting a placebo effect and I can't believe you might be missing out! Just go to your Nvidia control panel and change the refresh rate and resolution. Also turn on G-Sync if you plan to use it. I assume most are going to because it's amazing and it's why this monitor is so expensive. Now coming from a 60hz monitor, the differences when playing games now is like many people have said, night and day! The added 84hz, the beautiful colors, the big display, everything is very well built. made.
First I'll start with G-Sync. G-Sync matches your monitor's refresh rate to the refresh rate of your GPU essentially allowing you to play games without any stuttering or tearing, and also being a substitute for V-Sync, which gets rid of tearing but causes stuttering.. Before, I had G-Sync enabled in most of my games, (the only one that wouldn't quite work right was Fallout 4). G-Sync is one of the best things about this monitor, maybe even the best thing. A lot of people said that they can see themselves dropping down to like 40-50 FPS in game but can't really feel it due to G-Sync. I haven't had this experience exactly, I can still feel the frames dropping, however it does feel a lot smoother anyway. Also, rarely do my frames drop under 60 FPS, it happened in GTA V when GeForce Experience auto set my settings in-game to enable some advanced graphics settings my computer isn't quite ready for. Another example., I played The Forest and was on maxed out settings at 2560x1440. This caused me to play at about 45-50 FPS. I saw the frame rate but was amazed at how smooth the game still felt! This is almost definitely my rig, however this monitor (either the monitor or the higher resolution) does not deal with multi-sampled anti-aliasing, or really a lot of anti-aliasing, very well. This doesn't bother me too much as I can just turn off the setting and notice no difference in game, also like I said, don't be deterred, I'm positive it's my rig or the higher resolution of the monitor.
Next I'm gonna talk about the BlueLight filter and colors presets. Out of the box the PG278QR comes with presets if you click the second button from the bottom on that back area with the joystick. These presets all work very well for whatever game you're playing but I found that you really just had to choose which one you liked by going through each one whenever you played a certain game. It wasn't just, "Oh I'm playing a First Person Shooter now, I'm gonna switch to FPS mode." They all have variety and all look very good. The only one to complain about here is the Cinema one, as when watching movies on it, it doesn't really seem to add anything extra, it more so just adds an annoying blueish filter to your screen. It's not terrible but it's not something I really enjoyed watching. However, for some games that blueish filter adds some nice oceanic vibes to certain games. Ones this works well for me with is Tekken 7 and Just Cause 3.
The Bluelight filter included with the monitor is what the "Eye Care" section means in the product name of the monitor on Amazon. It is essentially running an f.lux type filter at different levels through your monitor. These work exceptionally well and really do help with long gaming sessions! I will say that there are pretty big gaps between the first and second level of the BlueLight and the third and fourth.
Next I'll go over the refresh rate. The monitor defaults you to play at 60hz before you change it. Once you change it, you can see it's only able to be turned up to 144hz at first. If you click the joystick once and just move right with it then click again, you've enabled 165hz overclocking on your monitor. I tried this and noticed no difference and read something somewhere about overclocking to 165hz hurting you monitor long-term, so I quickly turned this back down to 144hz. 144hz works just fine for me. (Anything's really an upgrade from my previous monitor.) On certain games where getting 144FPS isn't really an issue for you, you'll get the most out of this refresh rate, but overall it's nice to have this and G-Sync in order to get rid of those tears and stutters and give you a silky, buttery smooth experience. Also changing to 144hz when doing regular desktop work, just working in Photoshop, scrolling up and down on google, moving windows around, moving your mouse around, pretty much everything! I've heard some people say that you shouldn't do any sort of color sensitive work on this monitor, which I guess is true, but don't let that deter you if you're a casual Photoshop or Premiere user! I use both and they look just fine. The picture actually looks quite good. I'm sure it'll look better on an IPS panel, yes, but I'd rather have the minimalistic response time and lower price, personally.
I'll go over the viewing angles for a second. The viewing angles are not as bad as everyone says they are. I can't imagine any situation where someone would be looking from the far side of a monitor instead of sitting directly in front of it. Some would say if you're using a surround setup, but that doesn't mean that the angle is immediately ruined if you're not sitting directly in front of it, it actually goes quite far before you notice any of the purple or negative effects the far angles give you.
I'll go over the resolution. The native resolution for the monitor is WQHD, or 2560x1440 resolution. This is for sure the best way to play games. At 60+FPS, 144hz, G-Sync, at 2560x1440. A nice little added tidbit for me personally is that if your game isn't running too well at the new resolution, you have the option, like in any game really, to go down to 1920x1080, HOWEVER, it doesn't look completely terrible like you would assume 1920x1080 on a 2560x1440 monitor WOULD look. I have to do this with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and it still looks amazing! I only have to do that because of the currently poor optimization of the game, but in the future hopefully I can run it at 60+fps at 1440p.
The 1ms response time. This is something that I notice, but I would just say that overall the performance and responsiveness of my mouse and keyboard to my monitor is well above what it used to be. Whether it's G-Sync, 144hz, or the response time itself, I can tell you all of those things make it so that you have lightning fast response times from your mouse to your monitor.
GamePlus. These have two awesome features I use frequently, and two that I think are cool for others but that I don't really use. The ones I use are the crosshairs and the FPS counter. The FPS counter is obviously very useful for games that don't have a built in FPS counter and when you don't have fraps or another way to test your Frame Rate. Even though there are many free applications that will show your frame rate in game for you, this involves 0 applications! It doesn't even involve you having to alt+tab in order to turn it off or on. Simply go enable it using the back buttons, then disable by clicking the button under the joystick twice. The crosshairs I found useful for games that have poor crosshairs or no crosshairs at all. I used almost all of them in a variety of games (Rainbow Six: Siege, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Rust, etc.) They make it much easier to hip fire and are actually quite easy and fast to turn off if you find that you need to zoom into a scope and hit someone. Again, just click the button right under the joystick on the back twice and you'll have turned either the FPS counter or your crosshair overlay, off. From what I've seen if you're in the crosshair or FPS counter menu and you move the arrow keys, I believe you can move these two features around your screen. The FPS counter I like to have in the left corner and the crosshair fits perfectly on the middle of my screen but I can see why some people would want it moved up a tad in certain games. The other two features are pretty simple, ones a timer that will go off from set intervals. This is basically to set time for yourself so you don't play too much. Then there's the other one, which is display alignment. I don't really need this as my two monitors are set up fine as is. I can see why other people might use these though.
Overall, every game I played felt smooth and refreshing on this new monitor. This monitor will make you want to launch up old games, and play ones that were just sitting in your library before, simply because it makes things so smooth and enjoyable to play. I highly recommend this monitor, even for the high price. I think it's well worth it.
| Standing screen display size | 27 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 2560 x 1440 |
| Max Screen Resolution | 2560x1440 Pixels |
