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Asus ROG Swift PG258Q: 144Hz too slow?

2017-04-08
hey guys and welcome back to hardware I'm boss today we'll be taking a look at the Isuzu rog swift PG two five a two this is a twenty four point five inch 1080p TN LCD monitor now you may be thinking that those specs aren't too impressive but this monitor has one key feature and that is its refresh rate it has a maximum of 240 Hertz with g-sync variable refresh rate support so it's definitely designed for people that want to do high refresh rate gaming and professional gamers that want low latency I'm going to dive right into the design of the PG 2 582 to begin with and it's not a particularly small 24.5 inch monitor the display section is reasonably thick and the stand takes up quite a bit of space on your desk thanks to those large three legs that support it and the quite sizable pillar that holds up the display itself there's a number of gamers style elements around the body as well including V well a very interesting pattern that you'll see on the back as well as the Republic of gamers logo on the back of the pillar and the kind of odd LED illuminated logo that comes out from the bottom of the stand um seems to be that most of you guys think that that is a gimmick when I asked you on social media and I tend to agree but luckily you can both customize this by changing out the little clear insert that goes into the bottom of the stand and also you can disable the feature entirely if you're not a huge fan of it the PG 2 5 8 Q does look quite nice in the front though and it's slim bezels allow you to easily use it in a multi-monitor setup without much gap between the displays the stand supports a wide range of position adjustments that will be very useful for most people you get both height tilt swivel and pivot adjustments allowing you to position this monitor in pretty much any way that you desire and I appreciate the use of a cable management hole in the stand that allows you to easily route the cables into the back panel section quite a large section of the back panel can be removed to reveal the ports on this monitor you get hdmi displayport 2 USB 3.0 ports in a hub you also get a 3.5 mm audio jack to drive the speakers in this monitor which admittedly are particularly great quality and there's also the power port which connects to an external power supply you will need to use the DisplayPort connector to achieve 240 Hertz on this monitor you can only get up to 60 Hertz using HDMI and strangely enough there's actually no display port cable including the box of this monitor only an HDMI cable so you'll need to purchase that necessary display port cable separately and this is a definitely well it's disappointing a mission here from masseuse before I get into the color quality of this display it's definitely worth talking about its key feature which is its 240 Hertz refresh rate with g-sync I've used a number of high refresh monitors of my time gaming and I can definitely tell the difference immediately from say 60 Hertz to 144 Hertz it is an enormous difference that drastically improves the smoothness of your gaming experience as you start going above 144 hurts though you definitely experience diminishing returns I can discern a very minor difference between 144 and 160 Hertz and an even smaller difference between 160 Hertz and say 200 Hertz as you start getting above the 160 hertz mark and go right up to 240 Hertz on this monitor to be honest the amount of difference is negligible if that for most people who are gaming I think you'll probably be best suited to 144 or 160 Hertz monitor I don't think you really get much out of the 245 6 pews thats provided by the PG 2 582 there are some reasons however to push the refresh rate all the way up to 240 Hertz if you are a professional gamer looking at playing eSports titles particularly those of the fast paced like csgo you will benefit from the reduced input latency to this monitor when running at 240 hertz compared to something like 144 hertz simply put the inputs that you make to your keyboard and mouse will appear on the screen quicker at 240 Hertz compared to 144 Hertz and this could give you a slight competitive advantage like I said earlier I don't expect that most casual gamers will notice the differ between 144 and 244 Hertz but for those that really rely on the fastest action possible and making those split-second decisions that extra refresh rate might have an advantage for you I'm going to touch briefly on the on-screen display that's found in the asou speedy - 582 is the standard method of navigation is found on most seuss monitors which is the joystick toggle with the click button on the back this is how you navigate through all of their menu options and there's some additional buttons on there as well which we'll touch on in just a moment the blue light filter comes up to begin with you can toggle this on if you want to turn down the coldness of this model it makes it a bit more pleasant to use in say reading situations but it does affect the color accuracy so I'd normally recommend just to keep that feature off we've got the color settings here which I'll touch on more in the color calibration section of this review we've got the image set tree we've got things like overdrive which I found to be at its best on its normal setting there's very little ghosting to be found on this panel in general but the normal thing just has the best balance between reducing some of that motion blur we've got the adaptive contrast control which is something I definitely recommend you leave disables are not a huge fan of adaptive contrast on any monitors we've also got the dark boost which well it brings up the level of shadows which might give you an advantage in some games but again it affects color performance so I tend to leave it off the input selector we can switch between DisplayPort and HDMI here again you need DisplayPort activated to use g-sync and the high refresh rate and then we've got some of these systems setup options in here nothing too amazing except for the light in motion which allows you to turn off the LED logo that's projected onto your desk most of these features aren't too amazing the key features that you will find or might find useful in the game plus menu which is accessible through one of the buttons on the rear here you can add things like a crosshair a timer and FPS counter and display alignment features onto the monitor itself so if for example you want to see the frames per second of your game without using a software utility this monitor will actually do that for yourself and things like a crosshair might be important to you in some competitive games that don't provide across there for you in the game itself the final button of interest on this monitor is the game visual button activating this brings up a selection of default color profiles that you can choose between I did most of my calibration in the racing mode simply because you can't actually change anything in the srgb mode although for those that can't be bothered color calibrating the srgb mode will give you the best color calibration out of the box moving on to the color performance of this display and there are some limitations because it is a TN panel namely in terms of viewing angles horizontally it's not too bad but in terms of the vertical very angles they're not particularly great you'll definitely want to view this monitor from dead-on for the best viewing experience and of course you'll get better viewing angles from IPS panel but there's no 240 Hertz IPS panels that currently exist you'll also notice here in our spectra Cal Cal man software that we use for calibration that the contrast ratio is simply 849 to one which is lower than these thousand to one better suits races monitor app but it's not too surprising for a TN monitor taking a look at how this monitor performs out of the box and you will see here that the color temperature is 63 98k which means it's a bit too warm the ideal value here is 65 0 4 K and also the white levels peak at 400 nits which could give you a quality of eyestrain and normal viewing conditions we normally recommend that you calibrate this to 200 minutes and that's something that we will do a bit later moving on to the grayscale performers and a delta e value of 2.0 to is actually quite reasonable but not as color accurate as we would like so also notice here the average temperature over all grey colors is 63 52 which means again it's a little bit too warm the gamma here of 2.09 2 isn't particularly amazing either you can see that the grey line isn't quite matching the yellow line as we would like particularly thanks to that diff at 90 percent white again this is something that we can actually color calibrate as we'll see later here the saturation sweeps it's quite a decent performance here we expect most of the dots to be inside these squares and you'll see down here the average Delta II mm value of 2.13 again indicates that it's reasonably accurate but not as accurate as would like for any color significant work here is our extremely intensive color checker test that basically tests as many colors as we could possibly find you'd want all the values in this chart on the left to be under a delta e value of two for the best performance you can see that some colors are pushing up to Delta e 4 which isn't particularly accurate I'm looking in the chart over on the right you'll also notice that some of these dots aren't as firmly into the squares as we would like you can improve this performance quite significantly simply by making some minor adjustments in the on-screen display and anyone that buys the PG to 5aq can make these adjustments without having a dedicated color calibration tool so here what I would recommend is setting this monitor to its racing mode changing the brightness to 25 which brings it down to 201 Nets of brightness keeping the contrast level at 50 and going into the color mode setting it to the user color calibrated mode and setting red to 96 Green to 98 and blue to 99 here we'll go back into cowl man and take a look at how this changes the color performance we can see the temperature is very good 65 29k we've got our white value of 200 and 1.5 and our contrast ratio has decreased slightly but not significantly move on to our grayscale calibration you can see it's made a big difference here the Delta e average previously was over 2 now it's under 1 which indicates fantastic performance and most of those values in this Left chart indicate really solid performance here and the gamma well we haven't actually fixed that yet because none of the calibration tools in the monitor can adjust this and leaving the monitor on its default gamma setting of 2.2 is the best performance you can get without a calibration tool in the saturation sweeps you'll see things are a little bit tighter here an average D value of 1.65 is improved slightly over before you also see in our color checker test that again things have improved slightly to an average delta e of 2.08 you can achieve really good color performance on this monitor if you have a calibration tool though thanks to Kalman's utilities here we're heading a temper of sixty-five o 6k that is pretty much dead accurate in terms of its white levels you'll see here a grayscale Delfy average of 0.9 seven is very solid and so reduced all of the bars to under a delta e value of two which is fantastic here our CCT average of 64 73 is much better than just using the on screen display controls to calibrate this display and again it's basically fix the Gama to now a value of 2.2 1/3 which is very very solid in the saturation sweeps you can see the average delta e value has reduced to one point zero three which is a really good result for this monitor you see that blue performance still isn't as good as it could be in the right hand chart some of those dots aren't quite as into the squares as we would like but you only really improve the color performance here by getting a professional grade monitor in our color checker test again really tight performance that's been improved through calibration a lot of these bars are now sitting under a delta value of 2 there are some outliers but gem in general we've got our average delta e value of 1 point 1 3 9 which is a really solid result here for the PG 2 5 8 Q look at the luminance weeps here and you'll see that the 10% luminance values aren't particularly amazing but throughout the rest of the range you will get reasonably decent performance out of this monitor and in general once your color calibrated the PG 2 5 AQ I think you'll be quite happy with the color results that you can achieve overall there's quite a lot to like about the Asuza rog swift PG 2 5 8 Q through some minor tweaks in the on-screen display you can get a reasonably decent color performance out of this monitor although you are limited in some respects by the TN panel but the main feature of this model is of course its 240 Hertz refresh rate with g-sync if you're a professional gamer or just love playing eSports titles like csgo you will benefit from the increased refresh rate over 144 or 160 Hertz to make those split-second decisions particularly thanks to reduced input latency and response times there is a catch though because this is an expensive twenty four point five inch 1080p monitor at 599 dollars or 899 Australian dollars if you're not going to make use of the 240 Hertz refresh rate provided by this MOA you can save a ton of money by simply opting for something that's 144 Hertz or lower instead but if you do need that high refresh rate and you have an Nvidia graphics card the features provided by the Isuzu rog swift PG 2 5 AQ are well suited to your needs and that's it for this review of the asou speedy - 5 AQ you can check out a written review on taxbot comm there's also links to buy this model in the description below thanks guys and we'll catch you in the next one
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