Gadgetory

this isn't the first time that I've checked out a monitor with AMD freesync and you can watch my video about the LG 34 um 67 up in the little I thing but it might be the first freesync monitor to impress me with its variable refresh rate technology since it mostly avoids a significant pitfall that the other one didn't this is the BenQ XL 27 30 Z the AMD gamers answer to the critically acclaimed asus rog swift PG 278 Q that I declared to be the best gaming monitor yet in August of last year freshbooks is the online accounting tool for small businesses whose flexibility and ease-of-use makes you feel like a boss click my face to learn more let's start the video with something BenQ hasn't done as well as a soos the ID or industrial design of the Excel 27 30 Z instead of blowing red rings on the base in a stunningly slim bezel BenQ has taken the yo my eyes are up here approached with a plane completely uninteresting look but hey maybe that works for them since you won't be giving up anything as far as actual features are concerned front and center is the 144 Hertz 2560 by 1440 16 by 9 8 bit TN panel boasting one millisecond greater gray response times basically no input lag and what's this 72% NTSC color gamut support so about equal to srgb not too shabby yes it turns out that much like the rog swift which likely uses the same or a very similar panel this is not your granddaddy's TN with rubbish color accuracy nausea-inducing color and contrast shift and a washed-out low contrast overall appearance and while i wouldn't recommend it for any professional photo editing anyone coming from an older or less expensive commodity grade monitor is going to be plenty impressed more impressive stuff even though you don't have to use it thanks to the Vesak compliant holes at the back The Stand features all the usual adjustments tilt swivel height and even pivot and has some unusual stuff like a spot to put the puck controller that you can use to navigate the on-screen menu a handle for carrying it to and from LAN events both headphone and microphone audio jacks and even look at that a little headphone holder right under that bad boy are two of the USB 3.0 ports that run off the built-in powered hub then around the bottom we find the other two of those along with a metric wack ton of other i/o we've got the uplink for the USB hub VG I'm seriously VGA anyway DisplayPort dual HDMI inputs one of which is HDMI 2.0 dual link DVI the connector for the little controller puck and the microphone pass-through you won't actually need a pastor for your headphones since your audio will actually come over HDMI or DisplayPort from your video card and that DisplayPort port that's the one you're going to want to use primarily if you're a PC gamer because if you want to take advantage of the big feature of the XL 27 30 Z AMD's freesync variable refresh rate technology that is the input that supports it for now so let's talk about free sync just like in videos g-sync it allows the graphics card to work in tandem with the monitor to only update the image on the display once a new frame has been rendered by the GPU this is to eliminate stuttering and tearing in the onscreen animations as framerate swing all over the place during a typical gaming session but and this was the issue I had with the 34 um 67 while AMD in theory supports anywhere from 9 to 240 hertz refresh rates to match the frames that the video card is outputting per second modern LCD panels need to be refreshed more often than nine times per second or the image will actually start to fade in between frames being drawn causing an unpleasant flickering NVIDIA handles this with a strategic frame doubling or even tripling strategy that they've implemented consistently on their certified displays but on the freesync side it's been left up to monitor makers to determine how low they can go so with my last monitor it actually had an effective variable refresh rate window with butter smooth animations of only 48 to 75 Hertz a window that one could easily exceed on both sides in a single gaming session but what about exceeding the range of the window then well AMD handles this by allowing you to either enable traditional vsync and choose to deal with some leg when frame rates are high although it's fairly minor on a high refresh rate display like this one outside of the window or deal with some tearing by disabling vsync altogether something Nvidia does not give their users the option to choose but enough of this theory stuff what's it like to game on the thing well I started by fine-tuning the image quality settings because as much as then cues black equalizer feature allows you to see bad guys hidden in shadows it really does look like but and I wish they wouldn't enable it by default since it's only really relevant for competitive play and not the kind of sight scene gaming that I typically do and then when I was done with that I fired up some games overall impressions not too shabby free sync works as expected noticeably smoothing animations regardless of framerate so check out the ugly mini tears in this street lamppost in Grand Theft Auto 5 without freesync and then check it out again with free sync and the best thing about it is that it doesn't disappoint the way that it did with the LG ultra wide thanks to the much wider variable refresh rate window so the 2730 Z actually handles everything from 40 to 144 Hertz which if you tweak your graphical settings correctly should be plenty of room to stay inside but what if you do dip below that 40 fps what I tried to do was create a scenario with the r9 290x as well as the GeForce GTX 970 where I'd be floating in that 30 ish FPS range just to see how they both felt in Grand Theft Auto 5 and while I don't necessarily agree with Scott at Tech Reports assessment that the shift isn't that noticeable or that there isn't much of a difference what I do think is that any PC gamer who is gaming on a 144 Hertz display at that kind of a frame rate should be changing the settings in the game in order to get the best out of their equipment anyway because neither g-sync nor freesync are able to maintain their Wow the animation is still smooth even though I dipped below 60 fps affect the low around 45 FBI anyway so it's basically a moot point but Nvidia does seem to handle it a little bit better so with that said even though I could create situations where the gaming experience wasn't as ideal or quite as good as g-sync thanks to the large window and the configurability of PC games the excel 2730 Z looked great to me as a PC gamer using variable refresh on an AMD graphics card but there are some users who might not be as thrilled with the monitor it does have a touch more motion blur compared to the RG swift again not a closed ecosystem therefore harder to control things like pixel timing blip Adeeb loop and user Falcon teen from overclock dotnet points out that because BenQ didn't correctly implement single strobe backlight modulation at some refresh rates very notably 60 Hertz motion blur reduction which is the strobing backlight which doesn't work alongside free sync and therefore I would typically leave off on a PC anyway won't work correctly on a game console a bit of a bummer if you wanted this as a multi-purpose display thanks to its plethora of inputs which leaves just the bottom line is it worth it wow if it was the same price as my new favorite gaming monitor the xB 270 hu an IPS 144 Hertz g-sync monitor I would say no but at $200 cheaper whoo it's really darn competitive so that's pretty much it thanks for watching guys if this video sucked I think you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon buying a cool t-shirt like the one I'm wearing or with even a direct monthly contribution now that you're done doing all of that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out this sweet video we uploaded recently where I without giving too many spoilers significantly improve the performance of a macbook by dipping it in water you