Can your 240Hz gaming monitor do THIS?!?! - ASUS XG17
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2021-05-05
·
2,317 words · ~11 min read
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- If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that the world needs 240-hertz gaming monitors,
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no matter where you might be, at home, at the office, at the home office.
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This is a portable monitor from ASUS
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called the ROG Strix XG17.
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The cool thing about it though is that it is an IPS monitor
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that has a refresh rate of 240 hertz, so it's an awesome gaming monitor
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that also is gonna have nice colors and good viewing angles.
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This package is the $600 one. This is a stand, magnetic. I'll check that out in a minute.
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This is something no one's gonna read. Oh actually, here we go. It's a color calibration testing report.
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These are always nice to have included. So they claim that with their testing equipment
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in the sRGB color space, they had 99.5% coverage of that gamut
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and a color accuracy of 0.54, a Delta E average.
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That's really low. This is the unit itself. Very light, very thin.
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This is a USB-C 2-type C cable. You can use that for power and video transmission and audio.
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And this is a micro HDMI cable. Normal HDMI on one side to my laptop or wherever,
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and then the micro HDMI side is gonna go into the device itself.
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And is that it? Here we go. Here's that little adapter that used to be nestled in the box.
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Yeah, it's just a USB type A to type C.
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And also inside this, this is basically like one of those boxes that you use to organize your pills by day of the week,
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but instead you've got a wall wart in here. 100 to 240 volts, output 5 volts. There we go.
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This right here, the last two things on the desk here are things that are optional for the extra $100 package.
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The $600 package. It is $100 more expensive.
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Let's see if this stuff is worth $100. First, you get a bag.
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It has a couple of different sections. There's some dividers in it.
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So it looks like you could put the monitor as well as maybe a laptop
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or some books or something in here. So okay, I would value this at maybe,
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I'd pay like 20 bucks for this. Then you got this. This is a tripod.
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This is a actually a kind of cool little tripod.
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This thing looks like it's gonna kill me, like it's gonna hug my face
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and implant eggs down my throat or something. This is a cool little design.
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It has height adjust. It has 90 degrees there.
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And you can lock that up there. I think you press this button to release it back down,
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and then suddenly you've got a club.
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This thing (laughs) you could kill a man with this thing.
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This thing's heavy, man. It has a disc at the top of it. That looks like a quarter-inch thread
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that I guess will allow us to attach it to here.
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Yeah, this is cool. It's got like this two-tone brushed finish on the back here.
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Mm. I think though that it has a special puck.
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Is that, there it is. You just screw on this one part. There, like that.
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That's cool, however, once that's on there,
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it kind of makes this less fun. Like now you've got this bump.
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Having it on here though, this configuration, I call it toilet mode.
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You just plop her on the ground between your knees and just look down at your game.
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♪ Na ♪ This is an elegant little solution. Like if you plop this down,
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like, I basically feel like James Bond, like bam.
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You imagine putting that down on a coffee shop or like on the table of a train or something like that?
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That's pretty badass. Boom. How productive. Flatten that out.
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You can kind of have her right beside. Decent. So what's the valuation of this then?
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Let's say if I said that was $20, is this 80 US dollars?
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I don't know. It feels more like it should be like 40 or something.
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So 100 bucks for this extra package is kind of a lot, but I dunno, maybe they know that this is a niche product,
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so they just think people will buy it, I dunno.
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So let's look at your options if you didn't buy that and all you have is this smart cover.
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Okay, that seems like it goes there. Oh, this is cheating. I gotta take that off.
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This is if you're like way above it. It's actually okay like that, the angle I'm at currently,
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but you can't really get it to be straight up.
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Like that is, this is really precarious. It's gonna flip off of there.
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You could do this and then you can close it like so.
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Well, let's see how light it really is, 'cause you're gonna have to carry this thing around.
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On top of your laptop, 1,300 grams.
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There are keyboards that weigh that much. And don't forget, you might also if carry around this thing,
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another 640 grams which is the weight of a more like full-sized 10-key keyboard.
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So bear that in mind. On this side, we have the aforementioned micro HDMI port,
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we have a USB type C form factor, a DisplayPort, so it's the DisplayPort alt mode
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on USB type C. Then you have another type C that does not have DisplayPort,
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but it does support just charging. The DisplayPort one has charging and DisplayPort.
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This one's just charging, so you can charge this thing while you're running on HDMI, for example,
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which doesn't have power delivery. And then you've got a headphone jack. Up here you've got the power button and like volume rockers
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and just other OSD controls. And they feel reasonably tactile.
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- All right, so I've got my laptop here. Admittedly, this laptop has a 300-hertz display on it,
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so I'm trying to figure out if that makes it the least likely pairing of these two,
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or is it actually more likely? So I've got it plugged in through the DisplayPort cable,
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and I also plugged it in through the,
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I plugged in the power cable to on a different port. Even though you can charge
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through just that DisplayPort port, it was just like super dead and not working.
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So I said, "Screw it. I'm gonna shove as many electrons in this thing as I can."
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So here we are. It is, in fact, 239.964 hertz
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at 8-bit 1080p. And now if I actually look at one individual
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and track with my eye, then I can actually see the ghosting on it. And I can see some ghosting for sure,
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but it's pretty good motion clarity. The thing with this test is that little ship
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is designed to have elements in it that tell you how much blur is going on.
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So if this were a paused image, you can kind of see the little guy up here.
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He's got three green eyes. The ship has a white dots on the side
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and each of those dots is actually three dots per section of the ship.
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240 hertz really helps a lot with clarity, even if it is a fast IPS panel,
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which doesn't have as quick of pixel response times as TN panels.
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Now this one specifically, it's kind of weird because usually a monitor is always gonna say
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it has one millisecond gray-to-gray pixel response times,
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but they actually advertise this one as having three millisecond pixel response times.
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And again, usually they get that most aggressive number from the most aggressive overdrive setting.
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So let's actually check out the overdrive settings now. Overdrive. Whoa, five levels.
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We're on three right now. I'm gonna say right now that three is probably what you would want most of the time,
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but let's just check it out anyway. Let's go to five.
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And huh.
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Actually don't see a lot of overdrive artifacts for five.
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Let's just go down to zero, see what that's like. Oh yeah.
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If I track over here one of these guys,
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and I change it while I'm looking at that individual, I can see the ghosting trail just gets a little longer
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when I turn off the overdrive.
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However, it doesn't actually introduce inverse ghosting
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or coronas when I hit level five. The overdrive isn't that aggressive.
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And maybe that's because they're just aiming for that three millisecond
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instead of a one millisecond response time number, because in other fast IPSs like from LG
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or even the 360-hertz monitor which we are just reviewing on LTT,
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when you put them on the fastest setting, you get those inverse coronas which have a distinctive look.
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And on here I guess they just didn't push it that hard,
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so they don't really have them as far as I can see here. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't see them in game,
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I might on that setting, especially at lower frame rates.
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Like if I left this on five and then I played a game, or I'm only getting like 60 FPS,
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then I'm driving the pixels harder than I need to. And you might see overdrive for no reason
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because this display does not have dynamic overdrive.
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This does not have that, so you're actually gonna have to choose which overdrive setting you want.
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If I'm playing a game that I just don't get that many frames in,
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then I would turn it down to zero, one, two, three, and if I'm running at 240 hertz,
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I think you could safely put this at setting five. Like it really looks fine.
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Why don't we take a listen to the speakers?
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(bright music)
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That sounds pretty bad. It's pretty quiet. I mean, the speakers are there.
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They're integrated into this front section. Like look how small it is.
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Obviously, they're very tiny speakers. They're probably like phone speakers.
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If you're on the go, you probably have headphones anyway. And it has a headphone jack, so use headphones.
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This is like a pretty robust OSD. This is like all the settings you get
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in a full desktop monitor, so that's pretty awesome.
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Adaptive sync/free sync, Game Plus you get all the cheaty things, crosshair.
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Game Visual is just their name for different picture modes
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like FPS mode, right, like color profiles, cinema mode.
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Pretty accurate colors. It's not like Best Buy saturated.
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So the last thing to talk about with this monitor is battery life. It has a 7,800 milliamp-hour battery,
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which they claim will get you around 3 1/2 hours
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if you are kind of blasting the brightness
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and playing it up to 240 hertz. Given that it is a 240-hertz monitor
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with like decent colors, IPS panel, it has a battery in it,
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is it worth at a minimum 500 bucks?
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Now that's the price range of like decent mid-range desktop gaming monitors.
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For $500, you can get a BenQ XL256,
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like the e-sports monitor that everybody uses. Those are 500 to $550.
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(sighs) That's gonna be, I mean, they're both 240-hertz monitors,
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and this might even have better color accuracy, but that one has DyAc, like the motion strobing,
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all the way up to 240. It's gonna be a higher performing
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e-sports monitor than this, but it's not portable. This I can take to a LAN party,
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probably gonna be the best monitor there. I just see this as being too expensive for a lot of people.
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Like who is gonna buy it? Because if you have a really high-end gaming laptop
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and you just wanna upgrade the screen, then maybe you're balling enough,
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like you already have a $3,000 laptop, you buy this balling peripheral screen.
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I guess that person's out there. I don't think creators are gonna buy it really
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because it's only 1080p. So maybe the price isn't an issue
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for the customer who's gonna get this thing. I don't know, but it seems pretty expensive to me.
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I really wish it was maybe like 400 bucks,
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especially when you're talking about 600 bucks. I gotta put it in this bag.
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And this bag is really soft. I wouldn't really trust it to protect the screen
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from major impacts that are on sharp points.
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Well, that's kind of a beefy laptop.
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You guys tell me, is anyone gonna buy this? Hit us up in the comments section.
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Thanks for watching "ShortCircuit" today. This is the ASIS XG17.
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5 to $600, depending on the package you get. 240 hertz.
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Someone's gonna buy it.