what's faster than a 500 HZ display well supposedly an ASUS display at 540 but
that's not out yet so for now we've got the aw 2524 HF from Alienware uh one
thing I noticed is it's got this cute little whale on the handle I've never
noticed that once before I own an Alienware display in case that wasn't
already known by everyone and um it's
not 500 HZ though and I'll tell you something 500 htz is a
dream a dream come true it's so fast it
looks like it's like you're looking through a window honestly like I know that people say that basically every
time this feels like looking through a window into the real world it's so
smooth this is the only time where it's like indistinguishable we'll play
Counter-Strike on it later and just show you guys how instant everything is um
got a stand here this is only a 24 and 1 12 inch monitor and it's only 1080p but
that's because you know you're trying to hit those Max refresh rates for insane
Esports gaming um that's not necessarily
what I'm interested in I like a high refresh rate but I don't know past 240
it's hard for me to tell the difference until you make another big jump like
from 240 to 500 then you can actually feel it um in the Box probably should
have told you guys as I pulled them out we've got a USBC to DisplayPort cable
we've also got a C13 we'll see later if
this hooks up directly to the monitor or if there's a power brick and then we've
got a regular DisplayPort cable this is
what we're going to be using today to actually hit 500 Herz if you're stuck
with HDMI it's not going to hit there it'll hit like 240 I think at 1080p
we've also got our handy dandy USB B cable uh this actually really handy for
stuff like say you want to use the USB ports on the back of your monitor you
just hook up the ba on your computer and it'll transfer all the signals so for me
um you know I'm not sure how much latency it introduces but I put the
dongle for my mouse on my monitor just to save a USB port on my computer and
we've got our stand
stand who this one took a lot of effort
to get out of the bag uh we got the classic big old column into a big old
twisty screw here at the bottom pretty
Universal Design that most people seem to use not everybody we've definitely
unboxed a few monitors that don't use this system um but it's just so easy uh
We've also got this box what's in the Alienware box got the little alien head
on it I love alienware's logo man I
remember when Alienware wasn't owned by Dell and it was actually like crazy them
and like Voodoo H uh as for what's in here looks like it's just a safety and
regulatory information as well as a little alien head sticker if you want to
you know rep the brand a little bit and then we've got the display in here we're
going to do the old click clack and pull it out click clack
pull oh and then we've got a little
product guide here that tells me how to do all the things I just did we've
actually reviewed uh the previous iteration of this the aw25 24
non-hf on LTT and let me tell you it was
beautiful then and right now it looks great except for some of these scuff
marks one moment please it's got a pretty sweet stand it's not super big
and the nice thing is it's got these angles here so if you're one of those really hardcore uh csgo players who does
the whole angled keyboard trick um you can have it like lined up against your
monitor there if it's really that close but you know when it's only 25 in 24 1/2
you got to get in there uh as for these stands
capabilities it can swivel yep oh but
it's on the stand not the ARM you know I kind of like that it feels a bit like
sturdier when it's on the stand itself not on the ARM oh baby it tells you uh
to not try to Pivot it when it's all the way lowered though in the little booklet
we got so I'm going to put it back here and check out the uh this is the max
height and then oh tilt too you know it's always welcome uh but let's see how
low this monitor can go that's not bad
it's going to fit just about any desk and it's going to fit just about any
height something else I just noticed is
it's got a little headphone stand for you so whenever you know you're done
gaming you just take it off put it there in terms of just design you know I like
it it's simple it works it's got the big 500 HZ badge right here uh big alien
wear lettering on the front which I'm not crazy about that much branding but
it's really not that bad there's nothing on the stand down here no alien head
logo then if we look at the back like most Alienware logos it's got the first
model number over here 25 uh and then we've got the little alien head back
here neat little fun fact we had not this guy but the previous iteration at
LTX at the does FPS matter booth and B
ran it he's pretty good at games i' I've played against and with him in a couple
of Shooters he's pretty good and uh he said that the 500 Herz did not really
improve his gameplay or anyone's for that matter now someone who is a
dedicated professional Esports player it'll probably make a difference for
them for the average person probably not
took it off the stand real quick to show you guys the io uh we've got our C13
power plug here for our internal power supply if you really need a dedicated
external brick then this monitor probably isn't for you we've got our
usbb Port couple of usba a ports and then a couple more down here actually as
well so we've got four usba 3.2 and then
we've also got HDMI 2.1 and a couple of DisplayPort 1.4 aside from that we've
got a navigation nipple down here and then what looks like a power
button right there we're going to turn on in just a minute and I'll tell you
all about the panel that's in this bad boy but not before a word from our sponsor Nord security if you keep up
with the tech news as I do you know that hackers are always looking for new ways
to compromise everything from Tech Giant servers to Grandma's computer thankfully
Nord Security's well-rounded protection package is there to help protect your
files devices and personal data online and maybe get a package for your grandma
too she's a matriarch check out Nord pass a password manager that helps you
generate and store unique passwords across your devices and browser or Nord
Locker a powerful file encryption and sharing service that makes it easy to
store important documents or embarrassing pictures you don't want leaked to the world like gam Gams boir
photos that you did not mean to find cyber crime is everywhere these
days so make sure you're taking precautions when you surf the web right
now you can get 4 months free on all of nord's products so head to Nord
security.com Linus or click the link in the description below all right it's
turned on let's see it says 60 HZ there and I believe it this does not feel good
at all we're using DisplayPort because even though the uh HDMI connector is
HDMI 2.1 it's not enough for 500 HZ 1080p it
ain't enough so we're in 1080P that's great Advanced 60 garbage goes up to 480
now you got to change a menu setting to hit 500 but oh man even 480 like we'll
get that 20 extra Hertz but uh it's
really not much um yeah let's do it let's do it it says 480 in the corner
okay great it's working let's check out our OSD it's the classic Alienware OSD
with the navigation nipple I'm pretty big on this but that's mostly just
because I've gotten really used to it cuz I have an Alienware monitor we found
srgb to be the most color accurate with a Delta e average of only one and a Max
error of just 2.7 but it only does about
90% DCI P3 which is still respectable especially
because this monitor is not about creation this monitor is about gaming at
the fastest speeds possible so we've got a 490 you know we've got 1080p it's
going to be probably CPU bottleneck and we'll see how good it actually works
overclock 500 HZ baby is doing it it's
trying did it do it I don't know oh it doesn't feel like it it feels like it's back to 60 maybe I have to enable it and
then go in and change it back from 60 to
500 don't get me wrong this feels the exact same as 480 did to me when you're
going between 480 and 500 there is not a
whole lot of difference at 500 HZ that's a 2 millisecond frame time 2
milliseconds of frame time is very impressive the problem is you start to
see a lot of diminishing returns after about 120 240 HZ at 60 HZ you're seeing
about 16.67 milliseconds of frame time and then once you jump down to uh or
once you jump up to 120 you have that so
it goes to about 8.3 and then you have it again at 240 to four and then you
have it again um at 480 to like 2.2 or
something and then you know the 500 gets you that flat even 2 milliseconds that's
great but like there's a huge difference between 16 and 8 and even 8 and four but
4 to two it's you know it's pretty minor that being said uh my main test for just
checking you know what my refres fresh rate is probably running at is I just
jiggle my mouse and I try to like see how many cursors are on screen at once
look at all those that's science that's scientific right there uh let's do a
quick UFO test dang 500 FPS refresh rate
so it looks pretty good but I'm surprised by how much ghosting I'm seeing on the white and green frogs in
particular we've got vsync off but on it doesn't seem to make any difference with
that ghosting either so even at 500 HZ
unless there's some setting that I'm completely unaware of you're just not
going to fix that ghosting part of the problem is that while this is IPS and it
looks beautiful in terms of color and even viewing angles aren't too bad um
unfortunately it's just not going to be quite as Snappy as something like OLED
or even uh just a TN panel that stuff is
lightning quick especially OLED counts in literally like micros seconds for
Pixel response time so unfortunately we're going to end up with a little bit
of ghosting at least on certain colors or Shades like we're seeing here we're
going to try some games though because there is a massive difference between
trying to play a game and notice a frame rate versus watching it on a test
pattern um for me I find ghosting as
perceptible but not like super perceptible that makes any
sense like when you're gaming you're kind of busy looking at everything all over the place so it's not until you
start to pixel Peep and like look for things specifically that you start to
actually notice it unless a panel's really bad if a panel's really bad you
can tell pretty quickly now 24 1/2 in or 24 to 25 is pretty
typical for Esports size monitors and it's also pretty typical for displays
that are this fast the problem with that at least for
people who are used to bigger displays is that it's really small one of the
first things that both Belle and I noticed was like wow we went to sit down
in front of this and I'm like I've got to like get right in front of this thing
because it's tiny and so it's going to be a price that you're going to have to
pay you cannot get 500 HZ refresh rate
in a bigger mon monitor at least not yet maybe a few years from now but
definitely not yet so you know we set our FPS Max to 1,000 just to make sure
that this thing can breathe as much as it wants to and we are now getting you
know 600 700 maybe 800 frames a second
depending on where you are yeah something doesn't feel right like it's
it's hitting High FPS but it's
still with how blurry it gets when I shake this much it still doesn't feel
like 500 htz because it's fast IPS and
the moving picture response time isn't going to be as good as you might want it
to be it still doesn't feel perfect we saw the ghosting on the frogs we see
when I shake the camera really quickly it gets a little blurry and a little
blendy so I think that at the end of the day refresh rate just isn't King it's
important and is this going to look amazing yeah we'll fire up another game
just to look at how good the colors are and all that I think that when you're
deciding on what monitor to buy you really need to examine a lot more than
just refresh rate and PPI let's fire up
Doom let's see how Doom feels so we've got HDR turned on now in Windows and in
uh our sweet sweet display here and in
the game I got to say it looks okay it's
putting up some decent bright spots we measured 333 nits uh Peak brightness and
HDR which is fine uh the the problem
with this thing is it's not you know it's meant for stuff like this it's not
meant to look cinematic it's meant to give you the fastest frame rate possible
this thing looks fine in game I will admit when you're watching content like
this and you're not looking for individual uh issues it looks okay
you're not going to see a ton of Bloom unless it's a very like obvious example
of oh here's a you know pinpoint here on a dark uh spot the pro oh those bright
flashes from the gun actually look terrible it brightens up my whole screen
essentially instead of like just here okay so that's a really good example of that looking real bad um it doesn't help
that I'm also low health and so I've got some red filter on my screen it's not as
bad now that the uh film is gone but it
still brightens too much on my screen instead of a simple pinpoint right where
my muzzle flash is there's a reason that they're not even really promoting HDR
all that heavily for this version um the main difference between the HF and the H
is that this does not have the g-sync badge it does not have native g-sync
modu on it it's got free sing premium
which is pretty sweet I will admit right now this is not an awful experience and
I'd be more than happy to play this I'd probably play in HDR instead of SDR this
one without the gsync module the aw25
24hf is $650 right now which is kind of
a lot for a 242 in 1080P display that
doesn't even have a great HDR experience however there's really no
competition at 500 HZ or there's not much uh especially not when you want
fast IPS for better colors than a TN panel is going to give you what makes it
even better is the NVIDIA one with gsync is
$830 so if you want to save like 200
bucks and you were already thinking of getting the nonf version honestly you've
done yourself a favor by waiting because $200 less makes this a lot more
affordable to a lot of people I personally probably wouldn't buy this I
think that 500 HZ it's a little too much for most people 240 is still really good
and still a huge jump um especially different panel technology like OLED
where you have those Lightning Fast pixel response times it's a fantastic
experience this is still really really good and there are absolutely Gamers out
there who not only want this but need it
to get that edge over their opponent so if that's you the aw25 24hf from Alien
wear might be worth checking out this is ShortCircuit if you want to look at
another video check out the lg27 g95 QE
that's an OLED monitor it does 240 HZ it's not 500 but it's still real fast