What's faster than a 500 Hertz display? Well, supposedly an ASUS display at 540,
but that's not out yet. So for now, we've got the AW2524HF from Alienware.
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 it's not 500 Hertz though.
And I'll tell you something, 500 Hertz 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.
Got a stand here. This is only a 24 and a half inch monitor
and it's only 1080p. But that's because, you know, you're trying to hit those max refresh rates
for insane e-sports gaming.
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. In the box, probably should have told you guys
as I pulled them out. We've got a USB-C 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 gonna be using today to actually hit 500 Hertz.
If you're stuck with HDMI, it's not gonna hit there. It'll hit like 240, I think, at 1080p.
We've also got our handy dandy USB B to A cable.
This is actually really handy for stuff like, say, you wanna use the USB ports on the back of your monitor.
You just hook up the B to A on your computer and it'll transfer all the signals.
So for me, you know, I'm not sure how much latency it introduces,
but I put the dongle from my mouse on my monitor just to save a USB port on my computer.
We've got our stand.
Little stand. Whoa, this one took a lot of effort to get out of the bag.
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, but it's just so easy.
We've also got this box. What's in the Alienware box? It's got a 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. Oh, as for what's in here,
it looks like it's just a safety and regulatory information as well as a little alien head sticker.
If you wanna, you know, rep the brand a little bit. And then we've got the display in here.
We're gonna 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 the previous iteration of this,
the AW2524 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 CSGO players
who does the whole angled keyboard trick, you can have it lined up against your monitor there
if it's really that close. But you know, when it's only 25 inches, 20.5,
you gotta get in there. As for the stand's capabilities, it can swivel, yep.
Oh, but it's on the stand, not the ARM. You know, I kinda like that.
It feels a bit like sturdier when it's on the stand itself, not on the ARM.
Oh, baby. It tells you to not try to pivot it
when it's all the way lowered though in the little booklet we got. So I'm gonna put it back here
and check out the, this is the max height.
And then, oh, tilt too. You know, it's always welcome. But let's see how low this monitor can go.
That's not bad. It's gonna fit just about any desk
and it's gonna 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 Hertz badge right here,
big Alienware 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 Alienhead logo.
Then if we look at the back, like most Alienware logos,
it's got the first model number over here, 25.
And then we've got the little Alienhead back here. Neat little fun fact. We had not this guy, but the previous iteration at LTX
does FPS matter booth. And Bell ran it.
He's pretty good at games. I've played against Dan with him and a couple of shooters is pretty good.
And he said that the 500 Hertz 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. 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 USB B port, a couple of USB A ports,
and then a couple more down here actually as well. So we've got four USB A 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 gonna turn it on in just a minute and I'll tell you all about the panel that's in this bad boy,
but not before word from our sponsor. All right, it's turned on.
Let's see, it says 60 Hertz there and I believe it. This does not feel good at all.
We're using DisplayPort because even though the HDMI connector is HDMI 2.1,
it's not enough for 500 Hertz, 1080p, it ain't enough.
So we're in 1080p, that's great. Advanced 60, garbage goes up to 480.
Now, you gotta change a menu setting to hit 500,
but oh man, even 480. Like we'll get that 20 extra Hertz,
but it's really not much.
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
because 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 4090, you know, we've got 1080p.
It's gonna be probably CPU bottlenecked and we'll see how good it actually works.
Overclock, 500 Hertz baby is doing it.
It's trying, did I 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's not a whole lot of difference. At 500 Hertz, that's a two millisecond frame time.
Two milliseconds of frame time is very impressive. The problem is you start to see a lot of diminishing returns
after about 120, 240 Hertz.
At 60 Hertz, you're seeing about 16.67 milliseconds
of frame time. And then 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 at 480 to 2.2 or something
and then the 500 gets you that flat even two milliseconds.
That's great, but there's a huge difference between 16 and eight and even eight and four,
but four to two, it's pretty minor. That being said, my main test for just checking
what my refresh rate is probably running at is I just jiggle my mouse and I try to see
how many cursors are on screen at once. Look at all those, that's science,
that's scientific right there. 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 v-sync off, but on it doesn't seem to make any difference with that ghosting either.
So even at 500 Hertz, unless there's some setting
that I'm completely unaware of,
you're just not gonna 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,
unfortunately it's just not gonna be quite as snappy
as something like OLED or even just a TN panel.
That stuff is light and quick, especially OLED,
counts in literally like microseconds for pixel response time.
So unfortunately we're gonna end up with a little bit of ghosting, at least on certain colors or shades like we're seeing here.
We're gonna 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. For me, I find ghosting is perceptible,
but not like super perceptible, if 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 look for things specifically that you start to actually notice it,
unless the panel's really bad. If the panel's really bad, you can tell pretty quickly.
Now, 24 and a half inch 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 Bell 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 gonna have to pay.
You cannot get 500 Hertz refresh rate in a bigger 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. Yes, something doesn't feel right. Like 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 Hertz
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 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, peak brightness and HDR, which is fine.
The problem with this thing is it's not 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 issues,
it looks okay. You're not gonna see a ton of bloom unless it's a very obvious example of,
oh, here's a pin point here on a dark spot.
The problem, oh, those bright flashes from the gun actually look terrible.
It brightens up my whole screen, essentially, instead of just here. Okay, so that's a really good example of that
looking real bad. 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 film is gone,
but it still brightens too much of my screen instead of a simple pin point
right where my muzzle flash is. There's a reason that they're not even really promoting HDR,
all that heavily for this version. The main difference between the HF and the H
is that this does not have the G-Sync badge. It does not have a native G-Sync module on it.
It's got FreeSync 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 G-Sync module, the AW2524HF is $650 right now,
which is kind of a lot for a 24 and a half inch,
1080p display that doesn't even have a great HDR experience.
However, there's really no competition at 500 Hertz
or there's not much, especially not when you want fast IPS
for better colors than a TN panel is gonna give you. What makes it even better is the NVIDIA one
with G-Sync is $830. So if you wanna save like 200 bucks
and you were already thinking of getting the non-F 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 Hertz, it's a little too much for most people.
240 is still really good and still a huge jump,
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 AW2524HF from Alienware
might be worth checking out. This is ShortCircuit. If you wanna look at another video,
check out the LG 27GR95QE.
That's an OLED monitor, it does 240 Hertz. It's not 500, but it's still real fast.