BenQ XL2730Z - The Best AMD FreeSync Gaming Monitor?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,547 words · ~7 min read
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This isn't the first time that I've checked out a monitor with AMD Freync,
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and you can watch my video about the LG 34UM67
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up in the little eye thing, but it might
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be the first Freync monitor to impress me with its variable refresh rate
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technology since it mostly avoids a significant pitfall that the other one
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didn't. This is the BenQ XL 2730Z,
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the AMD gamer's answer to the critically acclaimed ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q that I
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declared to be the best gaming monitor yet in August of last year.
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Let's start the video with something Ben Q hasn't done as well as ASUS. The ID or
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industrial design of the XL2730Z.
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Instead of glowing red rings on the base and a stunningly slim bezel, BenQ has
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taken the yo, my eyes are up here approach with a plain, completely
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uninteresting look. But hey, maybe that
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works for them since you won't be giving up anything as far as actual features
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are concerned. Front and center is the
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144 hertz 2560x440 16x9 8bit TN panel boasting 1
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millisecond gray to gray response times basically no input lag and what's this
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72% NTSC color gamut support so about
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equal to sRGB not too shabby yes it
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turns out that much like the ROG Swift which likely uses the same or a very
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similar panel this is not your
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granddaddy's TN with rubbish color accuracy, nauseainducing color and
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contrast shift, and a washed out low contrast overall appearance. And while I
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wouldn't recommend it for any professional photo editing, anyone
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coming from an older or less expensive commodity grade monitor is going to be
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plenty impressed. More impressive stuff. Even though you don't have to use it
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thanks to the Vasa compliant holes at the back, the stand features all the
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usual adjustments, tilt, swivel, height, and even pivot, and has some unusual
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stuff like a spot to put the puck controller that you can use to navigate
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the onscreen menu, a handle for carrying it to and from LAN events, both
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headphone and microphone audio jacks, and even look at that, a little
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headphone holder. Right under that bad boy are two of the USB 3.0 ports that
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run off the built-in powered hub. Then around the bottom, we find the other two
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of those along with a metric whack ton of other I/O. We've got the uplink for
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the USB hub, VGA, I seriously VGA.
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Anyway, DisplayPort, dual HDMI inputs,
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one of which is HDMI 2.0, dual link DVI,
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the connector for the little controller puck, and the microphone pass through.
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You won't actually need a pass through for your headphones since your audio will actually come over HDMI or display
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port from your video card. And that DisplayPort port, that's the one you're
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going to want to use primarily if you're a PC gamer because if you want to take
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advantage of the big feature of the XL 2730Z, AMD's Freync variable refresh
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rate technology, that is the input that
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supports it for now. So, let's talk about Freync. Just like NVIDIA's G-Sync,
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it allows the graphics card to work in tandem with the monitor to only update
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the image on the display once a new frame has been rendered by the GPU. This
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is to eliminate stuttering and tearing in the onscreen animations as frame
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rates swing all over the place during a typical gaming session. But, and this
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was the issue I had with the 34UM67, while AMD in theory supports anywhere
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from 9 to 240 Hz refresh rates to match
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the frames that the video card is outputting per second, modern LCD panels
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need to be refreshed more often than nine times per second or the image will
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actually start to fade in between frames being drawn, causing an unpleasant
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flickering. NVIDIA handles this with a strategic frame doubling or even
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tripling strategy that they've implemented consistently on their
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certified displays. But on the Freync side, it's been left up to monitor
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makers to determine how low they can go.
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So with my last monitor, it actually had an effective variable refresh rate
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window with butter smooth animations of only 48 to 75 hertz. A window that one
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could easily exceed on both sides in a
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single gaming session. But what about exceeding the range of
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the window then? Well, AMD handles this by allowing you to either enable
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traditional VSSync and choose to deal with some lag when frame rates are high,
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although it's fairly minor on a high refresh rate display like this one
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outside of the window or deal with some tearing by disabling VSYNC altogether.
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Something NVIDIA does not give their users the option to choose. But enough
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of this theory stuff. What's it like to game on the thing? Well, I started by
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fine-tuning the image quality settings cuz as much as BenQ's black equalizer
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feature allows you to see bad guys hidden in shadows, it really does look
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like butt. And I wish they wouldn't enable it by default since it's only
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really relevant for competitive play and not the kind of sightseeing gaming that
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I typically do. And then when I was done with that, I fired up some games.
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Overall impressions, not too shabby. Freync works as expected. noticeably
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smoothing animations regardless of frame rate. So, check out the ugly mini tears
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in this uh street lamp post in Grand Theft Auto 5 without Freync. And then
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check it out again with Freeync. And the best thing about it is that it doesn't
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disappoint the way that it did with the LG ultra wide thanks to the much wider
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variable refresh rate window. So, the 2730Z actually handles everything from
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40 to 144 hertz, which if you tweak your
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graphical settings correctly, should be plenty of room to stay inside. But what
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if you do dip below that 40fps? What I
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tried to do was create a scenario with the R9290X
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as well as the GeForce GTX 970 where I'd
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be floating in that 30ish FPS range just
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to see how they both felt in Grand Theft Auto 5. And while I don't necessarily
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agree with Scott at Tech Report's assessment that the shift isn't that
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noticeable or that there isn't much of a difference, what I do think is that any
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PC gamer who is gaming on a 144 hertz
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display at that kind of a frame rate
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should be changing the settings in the game in order to get the best out of
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their equipment anyway because neither G-Sync nor Freync are able to maintain
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their wow the animation is still smooth
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even though I dipped below 60 FPS effect
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below around 45 FPS anyway. So, it's
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basically a moot point, but NVIDIA does seem to handle it a little bit better.
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So, with that said, even though I could create situations where the gaming
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experience wasn't as ideal or quite as good as G-Sync, thanks to the large
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window and the configurability of PC games, the XL 2730Z looked great to me
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as a PC gamer using variable refresh on an AMD graphics card. But there are some
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users who might not be as thrilled with the monitor. It does have a touch more
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motion blur compared to the RG Swift. Again, not a closed ecosystem, therefore
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harder to control, things like pixel timing, blippity bloop. And user
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Falconine from overclock.net points out that because BenQ didn't correctly
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implement single strobe backlight modulation at some refresh rates, very
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notably 60 Hz, motion blur reduction, which is the strobing backlight, which
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doesn't work alongside Freync and therefore I would typically leave off on a PC anyway, won't work correctly on a
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game console. a bit of a bummer if you wanted this as a multi-purpose display
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thanks to its plethora of inputs. Which
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leaves just the bottom line. Is it worth it? Wow. If it was the same price as my
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new favorite gaming monitor, the XB270HU,
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an IPS 144Hz G-Sync monitor, I would say
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no. But at $200 cheaper,
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it's really darn competitive. So, that's pretty much it. Thanks for watching,
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