500 Hertz is this real when it comes to
competition or even just the satisfaction of crushing Bots we've
demonstrated Beyond reasonable doubt that more is better when it comes to
monitor refresh rates we've got more
than ever the aw 2524 from Alienware is
the first 500 Hertz monitor to hit our lab and it is absolutely incredible sit
up straight Gamers because it's ergonomic color accurate and boasts
speed that's at the edge of human visual perception finally I can go from 2.78
milliseconds in latency to only two all
the Unstoppable no one will see me coming with 0.78 milliseconds of time
eliminated from my leg chain at last
every every Farm
except for one small problem we also
demonstrated Beyond reasonable doubt that while 360 Hertz is technically
better than 240 hertz the difference is kind of like going from a Supercar to an
even more super car and making matters
worse ultra high refresh rate monitors like this one are expensive do you even
need one of these when there are less costly contenders that might actually
even deliver a better gaming experience
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out at the link below I want to make this clear pun intended the aw
2524h is amazing it's 24.5 inches 1080p
so the Esports special but it's IPS with
accurate coverage of 99 of the srgb color gamut boasts 0.5 milliseconds
greater grade pixel response times and has an NVIDIA g-sync module on top of
Yes you heard me right a 500 freaking
Hertz panel I cannot believe the lab wouldn't let me play with this ahead of
time we were testing it this is smooth frog like the UFO test on blurbusters
it's a great way of evaluating the Motion Performance of a monitor or a
television but unlike the UFO test it runs locally on the machine meaning that
we can run this thing at 500 frames per second which is exactly where we land
after the recommended 20 Hertz Factory overclock it's actually 480 Hertz out of
the box I never thought I would live to see an IPS panel that performs like this
I'm definitely seeing a little bit of blur along the back of my White Frog
here but looking at these numbers
I honestly I'm kind of Blown Away
I've reviewed the script for this already so I know that overall we're not
hyper bullish on this display but I guess I'm gonna have to see the
competition because this looks really good to me even more
remarkable is that there's no compromise with respect to vibrancy or viewing
angles I mean it's IPS it looks fantastic I don't know what to tell you
man I am damn impressed by this I haven't even moved a mouse yet oh
wow hold on one second one second
oh my God great okay sure oh yeah look
if you're spending money on your chair when you don't already have the best
computer you're doing it wrong
but feel free to spend money on lttstore.com okay FPS underscore Max
1000 like I don't know hey there we go boys
600 FPS let's go this game is running at
up to 900 frames per second this feels
like looking through a window into the real world it's so smooth look at that
clarity as I'm panning around though you know normally particularly on things
like these power lines um I usually look to darks or high
contrast objects against the skyline like you'll see that you'll see that
blur or ghosting but man that is clear like you could you can
read the text Graham here did she bought
gray in there like what hold on hold on let's get right in here
oh what even if we can't run at the same
FPS I want to play something that has a bit of a longer time to kill because
that's what we found where the biggest benefit of high refresh rate and high
FPS for that matter comes in when you are tracking a moving Target that is
changing direction it's not just about the smoothness of the animation and the
clarity though those things don't hurt something to note is you do need to use
DisplayPort in order to hit that 500 Hertz even though it's 1080p that's
still a freaking lot of bandwidth and the HDMI port on this thing is only HDMI
2.0 so you're going to be locked at 240 hertz if you stick with HDMI I mean
realistically you're not spending this kind of money on a monitor and then not
hooking up a DisplayPort cable to like a
top tier graphics card like it that would be gross misallocation of funds
button just making sure you know why do I have a bazooka what game mode is this
probably like Fiesta or something what the hell is Fiesta this is where you get
random weapons you're playing on medium how many frames are you getting I don't
know like 350 FPS no okay hold on a second no
I need to leave this game and just play a different one because like I the whole
point of this was I wanted to like get in gunfights with people I get it
Brandon our expert tells us that while it is definitely not as much of a
benefit as outputting a higher this is the same stupid thing why is this oh
shoot I just sat on the power button oh my God
damn it well
it doesn't make you a better player but the monitor though right but the monitor
yes yes hold on it's so fast
got him look at this guy he's hanging from the
door this is how you know it's a really good display when all he does is just
end up playing Halo the whole time okay this thing is pretty amazing
just like tracking moving objects like this like again I don't compensate for
spread so I suck but if you look back that Crosshair was
on him like ah I love this thing okay
whoops sorry now seems like as good a time as I need
to point out that this display supports g-sync what's cool about that is if
we're running variable refresh rate there is technically a latency benefit
to having this 500 Hertz display even if
our game is not managing to hit 500 frames per second and Halo infinite did
not we did at best around 350. that benefit is very
so small there's just one problem this
240 hertz OLED from LG is running at less than half the refresh rate but
looks clearer to just about everyone we showed it to the vibes from this one
feel a little better I'm going to say this one this I think has the best
motion tracking it's a different kind of clarity there is far
far less blur behind our frogs here but
what I'm actually noticing is that relatively speaking the text is less
visible so these finer objects are
still very legible but not quite the
same I can definitely see why people like this image more though
but if you look at readability of text it's not even close part of it is
probably the resolution this is a 1440p display so these elements are smaller
but I should be able to compensate by just getting closer and I can that could
just as easily be 255 or 256 whereas here I can clearly see that is 255.
ghosting on the back of basically every leg of the Frog it's just much more
noticeable on the white guy whereas that ghosting is just gone on the OLED
however you can also almost see the the
judder on the OLED yeah so there's a there's a doubling of the image even if
it's not blurry whatever our subjective opinions might be there's no doubt that
when captured in a still frame the clarity of the LG OLED is higher and
this is where things get a little technical while the Alienware display
might refresh at lightning speed processing the data needed to Output a
new frame once every two milliseconds the individual pixels that make up the
panel here they still need a moment to catch up right I mean don't get me wrong
it looks incredible and in most cases it's almost imperceptible as we saw when
I was playing actual games but when we compare that to the micro
second response times of an OLED I mean take a look at this frog capture it
might be hard to see through our camera but in person the white frog has clear
ghosting as it slides across our IPS panel whereas on the OLED it is simply
not there kind of like how you can see our behind the scenes content on
Floatplane.com but on Utah but on YouTube it's simply not there get
subscribed so you can meet the team and check out how we shoot our merge photos
you can see a great example of why image Clarity matters in addition to having a
high refresh rate when you look at this video we did on a DIY 480 Hertz monitor
like five years ago sure we've got the
most up-to-date frame being streamed to us through the scalar but the actual
image was a blurry mess anytime it was in motion for the sake of fairness we
tried all the different response time settings that are available on the
Alienware monitor it has four fast super fast extreme and Esports extreme and
while Esports extreme is 0.2 milliseconds faster than fast based on
our testing the amount of overshoot and therefore visual anomalies that are
introduced just is not worth it at all especially for such a tiny Improvement
can you tell the difference between 2.4 and 2.2 milliseconds
I know I can't but back to our original question what
about 2.78 versus 2 milliseconds that's
the difference between a 360 Hertz Monitor and a 500 Hertz one okay here's
the thing as we make our displays refresh faster
and faster we get these shorter frame times meaning more frames displayed over
the same period of time I mean I was an early advocate for the benefits of high
refresh rate gaming the jump from 60 hertz at 16.67 milliseconds per frame up
to 120 hertz at only 8.33 milliseconds
per frame that was huge and just about
everyone in their grand Pappy can feel the difference even when you're simply
browsing the web or chilling on the desktop
but as we've shown in the past the faster you go the Lesser rare of a
difference you are bound to notice and the math for why that is is pretty
simple even if we were to take that 120
hertz and double our refresh rate again look at that we cut our benefit in half
and by the time we land at 360 each
frame is on the display for at most 2.78 milliseconds
back then to Dell alienware's own marketing where they say that 500 Hertz
is reaching speed that's at the edge of human visual perception well I think
they kind of hit the nail on their own head here can anyone tell even now
we brought in zawi's new flagship the 360 Hertz TN gaming display the
xl2566k to find out oh look at that it appeared I can't really feel the
difference I can't recognize a different I don't think I could really tell which one's a 500 Hertz Monitor and which
one's a 360. I helped set up this test I know this one's 500. I ca I literally
cannot see any difference at all in terms of like frame times between these
two I'm surprised how bright this is with black frame insertion
actually that looks really good for a TN
oh well yeah as soon as you go until
you're anywhere other than right in front of it okay okay okay uh Andrew you
should yeah yeah shoot it shoot it straight on okay shoot its good side
which is Dot from the side while you get the
crispness that's associated with black frame insertion or backlight strobing
and you can you can really see that on some of these Boulder lines
because these pixels are simply not switching as fast as on the Dell
Alienware as far as I can tell you're also getting a nice crisp ghost of an
image on every fine line every single
color while I don't see a blur behind the object I see a clear shadow of the
object behind it and that's on every color transition not just on the super
high contrast ones like I'm I'm really noticing especially on these color
circles yeah we literally were just talking about this there's a name for
this artifact that you see I forget the name of it though anyway the point is
especially on this red one I'm actually seeing an overshoot and I'm
seeing an after image yeah so that's inherent with LCD BFI because the
backlight can't turn in in sync with their scanner at every line so you're
always going to have that issue and people are saying they prefer this
well this test is meant for it to look
to find these things basically but maybe it looks really good in CS go or
something and what's really important in all of this is that all of us other
reviewers Brandon me ploof we are
splitting hairs at this point so yeah it
might be faster it might be clearer but to my eye imperceptibly so and to put
things into perspective the average gaming mouse is going to have anywhere
from one and a half to three milliseconds of processing latency on
its own I mean your keyboard if it has a thousand Hertz pulling rate might manage
one millisecond but we are getting to the point where these numbers are so low
and so fast that we are realistically gated by our weak human flesh not by the
gear that we're using regardless of which of these three monitors it is when
we're talking about an extra four or five milliseconds for your peripherals
and the average person's reaction time is about 250 outside of the most extreme
instances of Esports gaming the bottom line is it just doesn't
matter which doesn't mean that gaming displays
don't have any redeeming features the zowie model for example we've talked a
lot about BFI or black frame insertion that dramatically improves motion
Clarity it's not for everyone I personally don't like the generally
reduced brightness or perceived flicker but for some folks it's a must-have and
I've got to say to their credit this one actually has very little perceptible
Flicker and is really bright so kudos to
zali this is my first time seeing this one and compared to our OLED it manages
to refresh 120 hertz faster I mean this
is an incredibly crisp LCD display even for a TN one and that feature black
frame insertion is notably absent from the aw2524h meaning that Alienware is
counting on the Lightning Fast 500 Hertz refresh rate in order to sell this thing
can they then well at 830 dollars
this is a very premium 1080p monitor
even compared to the 600 Valley
but it's not entirely unjustified it's the first it looks much better thanks to
its IPS panel and in its default standard picture mode we measured an
average Delta e of just 1.5 with a maximum of six on red in particular it
also seems to cover more of the advertised 99 of the srgb color space
particularly red and purple so those might look a touch more saturated but
not abnormally so this thing looks great it's also bright enough hitting about
390 nits with local dimming disabled 400
nits with it on and about 450 nits at
all window sizes with HDR on with that being said there aren't many dimming
zones on it and the HDR color accuracy wasn't great so don't expect an amazing
cinematic experience with movies or games with it enabled as for the i o
it's all right we get two HDMI 2.0 ports so that you can have I don't know nice
fast pixel response times on your Xbox or your PlayStation or whatever a
DisplayPort 1.4 with display stream compression which you will need in order
to get to 500 Hertz though any GPU that could possibly drive a game
at 500 frames per second is going to have DSC you get four USB a ports one of
which is for an NVIDIA reflex latency analyzer a headphone jack an audio line
out and this super secret port for NVIDIA to update the firmware ah yes if
that sounds exciting to you you must have missed the memo it has a g-sync
module so if you like updating your own firmware in the event that fixes or new
features roll out this model might not be for you only NVIDIA can use that it
has height adjustment swivel and tilt and this is kind of cool the stand
itself takes up very little space on your desk meaning that you can get as
close as you could reasonably want to to your monitor when you're trying to get
every headshot and Counter-Strike speaking of which will it help you do
that technically speaking sure I bet if
you give this thing to a pro it could marginally improve their game because
once you're at the top that's all you're chasing but if you are literally anyone
else you're probably better off with just about anything else I mean on the
premium side that lgola that we showed you earlier is almost two hundred
dollars more but it's also a few inches larger higher resolution and will give
you a great HDR experience and it's not
even the only option a 240 hertz monitor will get you almost the same Real World
experience as these and there is ample competition in that space meaning that
those can be had for about 200 US dollars these days literally a quarter
the cost of this and a third the cost of this whichever route you go we're going
to have links down below I mean who knows maybe once we double up again and
hit a thousand Hertz for one millisecond frame times I'll have a different
Outlook you know with everything at a thousand Hertz the Thousand Hertz gaming
PC but for now the only difference to my Outlook is
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enjoyed this video you might enjoy the last time we tried to see if bigger
number better when 360 Hertz was all the rage spoiler it wasn't then either