you guys already know all about the cheapest 4k monitor that we unboxed and
checked out a little while back but the problem with that video is that the
cheapest 4k monitor is probably not something that most people want because
if you want the cheapest of anything you're probably hooking it up to an
entry-level system in which case you're gonna struggle to
run the latest games at 4k at decent frame rates anyway so today's video is
about what you guys really want the cheapest high refresh rate 1080p monitor
and for good measure we grabbed the second cheapest
and also the third cheapest and we're gonna see which one makes the most sense
for your gaming experience speaking of experiences our segways are one hell of
an experience the seasonic prime ultra titanium power supply is an ultra high
efficiency 80 plus titanium power supply it's kind of in the name that's backed
by a 12 year warranty check it out at the link in the video description
let's start with the scepter c24 this
one is going to cost you just
155.99 on amazon which is just
freaking outstanding like i remember it wasn't that long ago that to experience
high refresh rate gaming you were spending hundreds
of dollars not just like 150 bucks
so it's 24 inches it runs at a 144 hertz refresh rate it
features a va panel i mean that alone is
mind-blowing for you know a 150 dollar monitor again not going that far back in
time and it also features AMD freesync which
means that we may actually be able to manually enable g-sync even although if
it's not on the g-sync compatible validated list the experience
might not be that great
throw that bad boy in there
and use the included screwdriver
to assemble it even like 5 000 tvs don't necessarily
come with the screwdriver you need to assemble it
it's a nice touch wait what are you judging me by my screwdriver size it's
perfectly fine all right that's better not much in terms of adjustment but my
expectations again are pretty low for a budget monitor at least the stand is
made of metal but one thing that doesn't feel particularly budget is check this
out like again not that long ago getting HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort both of which
support the monitor's full resolution and refresh rate was not necessarily a
given and we've got a second HDMI that one's just HDMI 1.4 if you wanted to
hook up something like uh you know a game console in addition to your pc now
this is one you don't see very often to save room inside the monitor and
simplify the design they haven't gone with an internal power supply that's
perfectly normal but the thing that's not normal is for it to be just like one
of these super basic wall boards i mean this is only
like a 30 watt wall wart 12 volts three amps
nice they included a displayport cable
very nice it actually doesn't feel like a complete
piece of garbage either that's freaking awesome
so one thing of note is that the monitor is not actually very curved i was a
little bit worried because 24 inches is pretty small like it does not require
a curved display in order to get any kind of benefit out of it but this is so
subtly curved that it's pretty much not noticeable so one thing
that's noticeable immediately is that in spite of the fact that it's using a va
panel you can see our whites are quite uh they're quite gray they're
quite dirty you know just doing like a quick and dirty you know fire up an
explorer window and drag it around oh
yeah okay no that's a fair bit of smearing
i was saying from moving the cursor around it looked pretty good but this is
this is not this is not a tremendous result here
there's one button for menu
or back and confirm and then there's another button that's a
rocker for up and down so i found a couple of interesting things in here
there's no option to enable overclocking
or anything like that but curiously the NVIDIA control panel magically healed
itself there's our 144hz also i found the overdrive setting which to be clear
is not the same as refresh rate overclocking that affects how your
pixels switch and actually with it enabled i'm not getting too many
additional artifacts and that smearing i don't know might look a little better so
we're going to leave overdrive on for the rest of our testing all right let's see how this feels
actually not bad not bad at all that low contrasty look
ain't great you know it's not like this is the world's most
visually fulfilling gaming experience or anything like that
but it is very very usable
like we've got a really high contrast border here and it's it's smeary
but it's not artifact which personally i find a lot more bothersome than a little
bit of smearing for our final trick i want to see if we
can get more than 144 hertz out of this thing so we are running at 165 hertz now
now i've talked about this before to me that's not a an immensely noticeable difference in
smoothness compared to 144 or even 120
but hey hertz is hurts i'll take it all right well why don't we push further
then i mean should we try 240. now i'm hoping that
if we're way beyond the capabilities of the monitor i will be able to see if
it's skipping frames but there's nothing obvious
now i should be able to tell the difference between 240 hertz and 144-ish
no i'm definitely seeing some
yep nope this is not working correctly
so as i'm panning there's just occasional small stutters
or hiccups that i can more feel than see
like it's not something i'm going to be able to show you guys on camera it does feel pretty darn smooth and what
i can tell you guys is that if it even mostly that looked like a skip there
if it even mostly runs at 240 hertz then
165 180 200 probably no problem the
thing to watch out for with this monitor though is that in spite of its very high
refresh rate you can see how this text is blurry when i'm moving my gun around
its actual pixel response times are not great so it's not like you're getting
the the full high refresh rate you know premium gaming monitor experience
but for the price dang so i was kind of hoping that the
scepter wouldn't be so great because that is a pretty high bar for the new
sync 24 dp
to match here let's go ahead and crack this puppy open
and see what the experience is like so just
like the scepter this one runs at 144 hertz it's got AMD freesync it's a 1080p
panel but unlike the scepter it includes an HDMI
rather than a displayport cable and it uses a tn rather than a va panel
with that said at this price point and given that what we're targeting here is
high refresh rate gaming rather than say content creation that tn
panel assuming that it's not a horrific one may end up being an
advantage since our biggest complaint with the scepter was that very
significant pixel response time induced motion blur
instead of like a an attached sort of v-shaped metal stand
for the base you just get this
very inexpensive piece of extruded aluminum
with the screws pre-mounted in it and then
a simple plastic ufo frisbee base
excuse me disc disc
sorry
this is truly a very cheap mounting mechanism
now one nice thing about the new sink i guess is that it has a larger
power brick 12 volt 5 amps but
i'd say it doesn't weigh much more than the other ones so i'm not sure
how believable any of that is also i don't actually see like aren't you
supposed to have a ce logo on this thing for sale in north america or ul or like
anything i recognize so instead of just sourcing multiple
different power cords they just use all korean ones and then
ship one of these super cheap flimsy adapters with it for the region that
you're in now i could just plug in the HDMI
cable that was included in the box it seems decent enough but for an apples to
apples comparison if we want to overclock we're going to need displayport anyway so i'm going to go
ahead and plug that in and we can use this opportunity actually to take a look
at the i o so unlike the scepter it only
has a single DisplayPort and a single HDMI and it
doesn't actually specify what type it is here but we can figure that out quickly
enough this is curious there's enough room in the chassis to have an internal
power supply you can see they've actually got like a punch out here for
an ac plug but they went with an external power supply again probably to
save cost seriously yeah you can really
tell that it's got a very different interpretation of what colors should
look like and i think we're going to restart the game just to see what's
going on with all this weird kind of jutter that we're experiencing so let's
go ahead and do that kind of feels like to compensate for the tn-ness
they've like cranked the saturation a little bit but with that said
at least on the desktop or just browsing websites
it honestly looks pretty convincing like it's not
it's not bad you can only really tell that it's tn
tastic when you get to a more extreme viewing angle like that see that
from straight on it's not that bad older tn panels in
particular you'd really see things like this gray on gray for these
icons here would completely disappear if you looked at them from an extreme top
down angle like this i think it's fair to say that this is
pretty darn good for a cheap tn panel we've come a long
long way what is that
is that the monitor or is that my window no control of overdrive or anything like
that pretty much the only thing we can really adjust is turning freesync on or
off so our 144 hertz option shows up out of the box just to oh boy
uh-oh
well that is a real shame because aside from this obvious problem running at 144
hertz let alone 240 i would say that our
motion blur is significantly better like this text is much more readable why
don't we try 120 and see what happens
no interesting why don't we switch over to HDMI
all right so now we're using displayport to HDMI
adapter
actually let's use the NVIDIA control panel because i want to see if we're getting
those weird lines and it doesn't look like we are now we're limited to 120
hertz so that would be h2 oh shoot it did it
again okay now i'm done with this forget it i
mean at this point we had to lean on scepter for the screwdriver for the
displayport cable we can't lean on scepter to also provide like the monitor
and then still consider it an evaluation of the
whatever this thing is new sync you're done you're out that brings us to our
last monitor one that is actually marked down 20
right now to 160. you know you could use that extra 20
bucks to buy a water bottle lttstore.com anyway this one is from lg it's their lg
ultra gear 24gl 600 f and is the only
one from like uh what i would consider to be a tier one
recognized brand name also of note is that even at this price point ultra gear
is actually a new lineup from lg we've looked at some of their higher end stuff
they didn't send this we bought this but we are expecting this to be like an
all-new model completely new chassis electronics and all that kind of stuff i
actually have really high hopes for this one mind you at this point i feel like
i'll settle for a ul logo on the power adapter there it is
good job lg once again scepter stands out
with their included screwdriver
i'm gonna use that to assemble the lg monitor as well getting my money's worth out of this
thing but in fairness to lg while their ARM here is actually made of
plastic the base is significantly more
robust than either of the other monitors we've looked at and if you care at all
about the style of your display and you're trying to have like a nice
looking desk set up i think a lot of people will appreciate the little sort
of splash of red accent that they've got going on i mean quality of the plastic
is good actually with that said there's a lot of wobble
in this
that's like five seconds of wobble if you hit it pretty hard
i o wise things are looking pretty good here we've got displayport dual hdmis
headphone out dcn pretty much what we'd expect i have pretty high hopes for this
one even if it only includes an HDMI cable
i do understand why some monitor manufacturers if
they're just going to include one cable do opt for HDMI because from a
compatibility standpoint they don't know that this isn't for a dorm room where
someone's hooking up their xbox or whatever so let's plug in our scepter
displayport cable oh it's got nipple control
i like it so an exciting thing about encountering a name brand monitor at
this price point is that we can expect kind of a sensible
well laid out fully featured osd and that's exactly what we get so you've got
all your sort of gaming profiles which generally i don't think people really
use but whatever you've got the ability to set both basic and extended free sync
ranges black stabilizer if you're into that you can change your response times fast is
generally the one that i recommend that is the default don't turn these crosshairs on you're
basically a bad person use your in-game crosshairs but then all the other things
that you'd expect to be able to adjust so your color temperature profile and
all that kind of good stuff also one thing that's nice about the nipples it's
really easy to navigate without looking at it if you want to switch inputs it's
super intuitive unlike the last tn we looked at which disappointingly had
other flaws that just made it not a feasible option
this one does not stand out as having particularly vibrant color or
exceptional contrast viewing angles though
like the other one are decent enough this is a modern tn as opposed to an
older absolutely craptastic one
you know
that is a really weird kind of motion blur we're looking at here
so it doesn't have a long trail like the va
panel of our scepter but the text is not readable at all
it's kind of like uh like they're over driving it really hard
so it ends up not looking clear
but you don't see a long trail on anything
minimize one millisecond motion blur
reduction time now hold on just a gosh darn minute here
now it's doing backlight strobing and that is awful like it's not smeary but
you end up with sort of these discrete trailing images because of the backlight
strobing that's not something i would recommend turning on on this thing at all
while we're at it i'm actually going to change the response times down to normal
and see if we get less of that artifacting nope you can still see here so this is an
overdrive artifact where our x's are actually turning green as we move this
window around let's turn it off
now we're definitely getting smearing now in fairness to lg while those
overdrive artifacts were really undesirable on the Windows desktop this
is the most readable that we've seen this text while moving the camera around
and i think it's fair to say that our color profile is better than the scepter
with better native contrast it is noticeably better in game even if
there are things i really don't like about it from the desktop
yep so that's interesting
we set 165. the monitor
i don't know maybe could do it but
and maybe this is the other edge of the double-edged sword of lg's more
sophisticated firmware they are basically putting an error
message on the screen that says no you actually may not do that
also this stand really isn't very good
so conclusion time then this was really surprising to me on
paper i was not expecting to like the scepter va panels aren't known for their
amazing response times and we did get some ghosting but it has other redeeming
qualities that i felt really made up for it it's got great inputs given the price
point it was massively overclockable even though we
might have gotten a peach here but to be clear we just bought it off amazon so
you could just as easily get one as us and while the curve is not something
that i desired what i found was that it's so subtle that it just wasn't
noticeable at all with that said for a mere five dollars more if i'm not
interested in overclocking my monitor and i want something that's a bit more
of a polished experience lg's ultra gear
also really stands out with that said we
don't know if this promo is going to last forever and at a
difference to me if you're going for a budget high
refresh rate monitor the scepter easily wins our pick
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not happy you can send the item back and get a full refund so thanks for watching
guys hope you enjoyed this video if you did maybe check out our other review of
lg's high-end ultra gear monitor we'll have that linked below and i will see
you next time