Acer’s XF270HUA has been round for a few yr, however this 27in monitor continues to be a fantastic purchase whereas shares final. With a decision of 2560×1440, a excessive 144Hz refresh price for tremendous easy gaming and excellent image high quality, that is one show you received’t thoughts dropping £500 on.
Even earlier than I started my assessments, I may inform this monitor was a bit particular. It’s an actual looker, for starters, with slim bezels, an understated management panel and a tasteful pink ring spherical the peak/tilt/swivel/rotate-adjustable stand with not a single LED in sight. You additionally get loads of connectivity choices, together with DVI-D and DisplayPort, two HDMIs, a four-port USB3 hub and headphone and audio in jacks, making it much more versatile than the £400 Asus PG248Q I checked out final week.
Image high quality is the place the Acer XF270HUA actually shines, although, and that good feeling I had once I first turned it on bore out in my calibration assessments, because it produced a virtually good image with solely essentially the most minimal quantity of tweaking. This is basically due to its IPS panel, which typically produces essentially the most correct colors out of all of the totally different panel varieties, however even I’ve hardly ever seen one this good.
For these within the technical nitty-gritty, it lined 99.three% of the sRGB color gamut once I switched to its User color profile and knocked down the inexperienced bias setting a few notches, and its total brightness degree went all the way in which as much as 400cd/m2 – which is greater than sufficient luminance no matter whether or not you’re gaming in shiny daylight or sitting huddled over your desk in a darkened room. Throw in a few blue gentle filters, and the XF270HUA also needs to hold eye-strain to a minimal whenever you’re hours deep right into a cross-continental drive in American Truck Simulator.
Admittedly, I wasn’t so eager on the monitor’s three default gaming modes, as these ramped up the sharpness to make pictures and desktop icons seem overly pixelated throughout on a regular basis use. Thankfully, the remainder of its color profiles had been a lot simpler on the attention. More importantly, it can save you any mixture of settings you want to every of these very three gaming modes, letting you customise your viewing expertise nonetheless you want with minimal fuss and fiddling – useful when the monitor fails to recollect your most well-liked choices everytime you swap modes.
I additionally appreciated you could manually modify the monitor’s gamma ranges as effectively. Without stepping into an excessive amount of technical element on the topic, this primarily controls the stability between gentle and darkish areas of the display – the next gamma setting (2.2 or above) will make pictures and video games seem very darkish with pitch black shadow areas, whereas a decrease gamma setting (2.2 or under) will assist carry the veil on these dingy corners and reveal a larger degree of element.
It’s the same thought to these in-game brightness bars you get the place you’re informed to regulate the picture till the sport’s emblem or one thing is barely seen, solely right here you possibly can apply it to all the pieces you do in your PC. This can be helpful in the event you’re contemplating utilizing the monitor for detailed picture or video modifying, nevertheless it’s additionally useful if, like me, you’re a little bit of a wimp in relation to taking part in horror video games and wish to see each risk coming a mile off with out spending ages looking for that rattling in-game brightness slider.
The XF270HUA’s 144Hz refresh price additionally labored a deal with. Much just like the Asus PG240Q, this enables video games to run at greater body charges than your common 60Hz monitor – on this case, as much as 144fps. Frame counters will clearly go greater in the event you’ve obtained a beefy sufficient graphics card and disable the V-Sync possibility, however the variety of frames you really see continues to be restricted by the variety of instances a display is ready to refresh its show, so these kinds of monitor are a fantastic possibility in the event you really feel like your present graphics card is on the uppermost restrict in your favorite video games. Watching orcs come hurtling in the direction of us in Middle-earth: Shadow of War was a a lot tastier deal with for the eyes than Peter Jackson’s headache-inducing 48fps tackle The Hobbit.
The XF270HUA additionally has AMD FreeSync assist, which helps stop display tearing and stabilises the monitor’s refresh price if the body price occurs to take an surprising dip, making video games seem smoother and fewer stuttery. Naturally, these with Nvidia graphics playing cards received’t get any use out of this, however AMD house owners ought to discover it notably useful when utilising the XF270HUA’s full 2560×1440 decision on greater graphics settings.
Even if it didn’t have FreeSync, although, I’d be a lot happier spending £500 on the Acer XF270HUA than I’d paying £400 for Asus’ PG248Q. It’s an even bigger, better-looking monitor with the next decision (personally, I wouldn’t suggest shopping for a 27in monitor with something lower than a 2560×1440 decision) and my eyes aren’t bionic sufficient to inform the distinction between the Acer’s 144Hz refresh price and the Asus’ overclocked 180Hz refresh price. Deus Ex’s Adam Jensen would possibly, however till I’ve additionally obtained shades that may prolong out of my eyebrows, I actually can’t see any profit in having the additional 36Hz. If high-frame price gaming is what you’re after, then screens don’t come a lot better than this one.
