Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

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lexlazootin
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by lexlazootin » 31 Dec 2017, 02:42

"including backlight mounting and adherence (which may or may not cause more backlight bleed on one brand with the same panel than on the other)"

Pretty much all panels especially gaming AUO ones come with the back light pre-attached. You make it sound like they all come up with their own backlight method and the specific vendors attach it themselves. All of these monitors are using the same panel, which is the AUO M270DAN02.3 which comes pre-attached.

But most of the other things are splitting hairs if even true. Like who needs to know about resolution timings? i bet the temperature and the luck of the panel lottery has more to do with what you're saying then any advice you could give him.

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jorimt
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by jorimt » 31 Dec 2017, 10:22

@lexlazootin, depending on the chassis design, the same panel can indeed have a different backlight retention system across different brands.

My Acer XB271HU, for instance, is adhered with a double-sided foam adhesive, whereas the ASUS PG279Q (same panel) features a more traditional (slotted) retention method. This gave each model a different level/placement/probability/variance (what have you) of backlight bleed.

Vega probably doesn't know this, but when I was originally shopping for my monitor, I was having a hard time choosing between the XB271HU and the PG279Q, but his excellent post here decided it for me at the time:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1554247/buil ... t_24676825

It's a good (though granted, not always a typical) example of the differences you may see across brands with the same panel.

EDIT: And yes, while resolution timing differences thankfully shouldn't be an issue on G-SYNC monitors due to the stricter Nvidia guidelines and testing, they can be with FreeSync monitors; for instance, differences in timings can result in skipped frames on some of the 240Hz FreeSync monitors, and no skipped frames on other models with the identical panel.
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Displays: ASUS PG27AQN, LG 48CX VR: Beyond, Quest 3, Reverb G2, Index OS: Windows 11 Pro Case: Fractal Design Torrent PSU: Seasonic PRIME TX-1000 MB: ASUS Z790 Hero CPU: Intel i9-13900k w/Noctua NH-U12A GPU: GIGABYTE RTX 4090 GAMING OC RAM: 32GB G.SKILL Trident Z5 DDR5 6400MHz CL32 SSDs: 2TB WD_BLACK SN850 (OS), 4TB WD_BLACK SN850X (Games) Keyboards: Wooting 60HE, Logitech G915 TKL Mice: Razer Viper Mini SE, Razer Viper 8kHz Sound: Creative Sound Blaster Katana V2 (speakers/amp/DAC), AFUL Performer 8 (IEMs)

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Chief Blur Buster
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 31 Dec 2017, 16:56

darzo wrote:My initial inclination would be to avoid ViewSonic and AOC.
Well, I'm not sure about blanket "avoid-a-manufacturer" statements....

For the AOC, get the G-SYNC version rather than the FreeSync version. AOC didn't do well at first to calibrate the overdrive of their early FreeSync monitors.

For the ViewSonic, their pro is that they tend to do closer than average color calibration: You unbox a Viewsonic and the colors are usually quite spot on for most people. The Amazon reviews of the ViewSonic XG2703-S 1440p G-SYNC is excellent (4.3 stars from 232 users), and I believe RealNC (mod here) has that one.

Even BenQ had their issues, remember BlurBusters caused BenQ/Zowie to release a firmware upgrade for XL2720Z? That was a huge strobe bug. But it had a great positive effect for consumers: Ever since then, BenQ Zowie has now enabled user-adjustable strobe phase and strobe length and our Strobe Utility is the first BenQ authorized third party adjustment utility, or via Service Menu.

So, even AOC/ViewSonic can do good, and even BenQ Zowie can occasionally do worse: Sometimes there's bugs, and sometimes there's bugfixes. It's worth noting that the AOC/ViewSonic 240Hz frameskipping bugs were manually fixable without a firmware upgrade...while the BenQ bug was unfixable/unsolvable without a firmware upgrade.

Also, not just bugs, but we influence the monitor industry to add new features. The existence of "ULMB Pulse Width" menu setting can be attributed to Blur Busters giving NVIDIA feedback (from the LightBoost 10% vs 50% vs 100% article) -- back when NVIDIA donated a G-SYNC monitor to Blur Busters to give away in a contest that launched these Blur Busters Forums at the beginning, during the G-SYNC Preview days) -- December 17, 2013 Forum Launch Announcement by Blur Busters.

Bugs are frustrating but we try to give feedback to manufacturers to fix/improve. And we try to publish workarounds.

I advocate that monitor manufacturers should make their future models firmware upgradeable by users, with an easy firmware upgrade utility. We'll probably think up a social media drive to convince monitor manufacturers to do this. TV manufacturers now have user firmware upgradeability, but monitor manufacturers do not....yet. So bugs (overdrive bugs, frameskip bugs, strobe bugs) can be fixed by downloading a firmware upgrade rather than sending the monitor back. It's time for this to happen.

Not to mention, ULMB exists partially because of our LightBoost advocacy that was a big part of BlurBuster's early existence. The LightBoost HOWTO is still one of the most popular BlurBusters pages, even to this day, even though other better strobe backlights (ULMB) has replaced it.

Also, little known currently (But is coming out in a book during 2018 by a known industry author) -- but my early contract with the very original Oculus Kickstarter for low-persistence research, in the pre-Carmack/pre-Abrash days (which apparently later led to them anxiously looking for low-persistence talent and put their research in overdrive) -- the early employees of Oculus were beta testers of TestUFO over 6 months prior to the TestUFO public launch! The rest is history -- VR and low persistence OLED rolling scans arrived a few years earlier than I had originally expected, even though I moved on shortly after that Kickstarter ended, but I apparently helped flip a domino effect, there.

One of the current drives (e.g. the 1000Hz advocacy -- Blur Busters Law & The Amazing Journey To Future 1000Hz Displays) aims to drive the monitor manufacturer a little forward too in the ultra long term. Make people think, get at least a few more engineers on it, and bring these kinds of things to a reality within our lifetimes. Formerly, I didn't think it would happen within my lifetime, but after seeing experimental displays and even early framerate amplification technologies, I'm now convinced that there's a manageable (albiet long) path of innovation forward within less than one human generation.
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darzo
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by darzo » 31 Dec 2017, 23:33

jorimt wrote:Vega probably doesn't know this, but when I was originally shopping for my monitor, I was having a hard time choosing between the XB271HU and the PG279Q, but his excellent post here decided it for me at the time:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1554247/buil ... t_24676825
11. IPS glow. The ASUS gives off a distracting tan glow. The Acer gives off a less distracting silver glow. Win = Acer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5c2X20pOKk
Yes. This is something I noticed. The Asus monitors can have what I have referred to as a yellow tint and what this video shows whereas the Acer I have doesn't have it (all TN monitors, by the way). Glad others have picked up on something specific like this. Although it's interesting one of the youtube comments mentions a second Asus unit not having it. Regardless, this seems like something negative you can encounter with Asus. I also don't think this is the full extent to which I came with an impression that my two Acer 240hz units (returned the first for buzzing at 240hz but unfortunately that's a common defect) had better picture than the 240hz Asus I tried.

I actually think too much of that post beats around the bush looking for things to comment on (I get annoyed by reviews that spend much on looks and inconsequential simple things like OSD), or at least is not properly ordered, but at least it's something.
The ASUS also has a strange brighter hue circle lower center on the screen about the size of four pixels. Strange anomaly I haven't seen before.
Funny he mentions this, I also found one such circle lower center on one of my screens. It may very well be on the pg278qr, which is the TN version of the monitor. How crazy is that?

So for my money I'll be going with Acer when the 4k 144hz monitors come out with the new gen cards. Interestingly, Asus is actually the leader in sales, by a big margin too. A good deal of that may be that they are Chinese (or am I wrong?) but I also see them more aggressively placing their products on Twitch.

PS

I also had some trouble mounting my pg278qr on a VESA stand because, unlike Acer, the space for the attachment is too small vertically.
Thanks for the comparison! Could you please compare the temperature uniformity between the two monitors? (aka the dreaded yellow tint that almost all Asus monitors seem to have)
Interesting. A shame you need to encounter this stuff in random places rather than in reviews. Unfortunately a lot of idiots write reviews for a living.

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jorimt
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by jorimt » 01 Jan 2018, 00:25

@darzo, yes I agree that even some of the best monitor reviewers (few as they are) drone on a bit more than I'd like, and yes, it would be nice if they pointed out more of the flaws of individual models more explicitly, but we have to also consider that there can be a large variance in issues just from unit to unit of the same model, let alone units of a different brand, which can make mainstream reviewing of such issues impractical, unfortunately.
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Author: Blur Busters "G-SYNC 101" Series

Displays: ASUS PG27AQN, LG 48CX VR: Beyond, Quest 3, Reverb G2, Index OS: Windows 11 Pro Case: Fractal Design Torrent PSU: Seasonic PRIME TX-1000 MB: ASUS Z790 Hero CPU: Intel i9-13900k w/Noctua NH-U12A GPU: GIGABYTE RTX 4090 GAMING OC RAM: 32GB G.SKILL Trident Z5 DDR5 6400MHz CL32 SSDs: 2TB WD_BLACK SN850 (OS), 4TB WD_BLACK SN850X (Games) Keyboards: Wooting 60HE, Logitech G915 TKL Mice: Razer Viper Mini SE, Razer Viper 8kHz Sound: Creative Sound Blaster Katana V2 (speakers/amp/DAC), AFUL Performer 8 (IEMs)

darzo
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by darzo » 01 Jan 2018, 01:09

I have an even bigger problem with all the reviews that are virtually devoid of content. People get paid for that.

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RealNC
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by RealNC » 01 Jan 2018, 01:35

Also, don't forget that review units are very often cherry-picked. They perform better than the average unit.
Chief Blur Buster wrote:
darzo wrote:My initial inclination would be to avoid ViewSonic and AOC.
Well, I'm not sure about blanket "avoid-a-manufacturer" statements....

For the ViewSonic, their pro is that they tend to do closer than average color calibration: You unbox a Viewsonic and the colors are usually quite spot on for most people. The Amazon reviews of the ViewSonic XG2703-S 1440p G-SYNC is excellent (4.3 stars from 232 users), and I believe RealNC (mod here) has that one.
Well, the only vendor I have an "aversion" to is AOC. They did seem, for a long time, to produce lower quality products in an attempt to compete for the lowest price. This feeling was amplified by the fact that the worst monitor I have ever owned was an AOC (it was using a very incompetent overdrive implementation and came with an atrocious build quality.)

ViewSonic has a long history and they've been producing good displays for a very long time (since the 80's; they had very solid CRT monitors.) In fact, ViewSonic was among the first manufacturers (with Apple and IBM) to produce LCD monitors that didn't completely suck compared to CRTs.

Also, maybe the fact that they never focused on "gaming gear" before was the reason for choosing the ViewSonic. I have an aversion to "gaming gear", which over the years resulted in a bias against Asus and Acer :-P And it kind of showed in the design of the monitors. The ViewSonic was still a gaming monitor, but the least offensive one of the bunch. It just appears a bit more professional compared to the others that look more like toys. And the reviews were good, so it seemed like the natural choice.

But other than looks, OSD and default calibrations, these monitors do seem to perform very similar, especially when it comes to motion quality. They have a nice, clear image ("I can't believe this is IPS") during motion, and contrast and black levels are impressive if you're coming from a TN monitor. And I haven't spotted even a single inversion artifact yet (during normal use that is, in synthetic inversion tests you're always gonna get inversion with LCD displays.)
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by RealNC » 01 Jan 2018, 01:40

darzo wrote:I have an even bigger problem with all the reviews that are virtually devoid of content. People get paid for that.
There's some "reviewers" out there who post fake reviews. They write a lot of useless information without a single actual test or measurement in them. I learned to ignore those. Some of them even have names to confuse people and make them think they're on another site (there's a site for example that calls itself "Tom's guide" in an attempt to make people think they're reading a Tom's Hardware review.)

There's a LOT of such sites. Just ignore them.
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dhaine
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by dhaine » 01 Jan 2018, 14:10

is IPS that important for you? it has better color and better viewing angle, but it's "usually" not the best option for fast fps and pixel responsiveness and input lag, even if some of them are amazingly close (acer and asus)

hux0
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Re: Looking for: 27" IPS, 1440p, G-Sync

Post by hux0 » 03 Jan 2018, 11:25

Well, I am used to use IPS Panels for more than 10 years, so I have a hard time to consider a TN Panel.

I found an OK'ish deal on the ViewSonic, so I just placed my order with it and see how it performs. I will have an eye for BLB and Glow, and if I don't find it to be worth the price (what I already am debating with myself), it will be returned.

At that point, I would be open to try a TN, maybe a 1080p Display just to have something affordable until a IPS comes out that beats the current AUO Panel.

Thanks for the posts, it was definately helpful for my decision. We all know there is no perfect, but affordable monitor on the market, so let's see how satisfied I will be.

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