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at 24.5 inches is on the small and low-res side, but again, the monitor is designed for competitive esports gaming, where you want to be able to see the entire screen without darting your eyes around. The lower 1080p resolution ensures you can push as many frames as possible to reach that super-fast refresh rate, so while it isn't ideal for desktop work, it's all your graphics card can probably handle for gaming this smooth. And if you can't quite hit 360Hz, G-Sync is there to ensure you don't get any stutter or screen tearing. Next, in the Nvidia control panel, under the "Display" option on the left, in "Adjust desktop color settings", I set the color channel to "All Channels", increased the Brightness to 72%, lowered the contrast to 25%, and lowered the Gamma to .96. Digital vibrance and Hue were left alone. I've been reading that the best Gamma options are between 1.8 and 2.2 for computer monitors but I couldn't raise the Gamma in the nvidia control panel that high because the entire monitor would appear insanely washed out and no other combo of settings could get rid of that effect. I also used the windows color management tool and the below linked tool while tweaking the settings. Based on an IPS panel, the Dell AW2521HF monitor delivers accurate, consistent, and vivid colors covering the standard and most widespread sRGB color space with 99% sRGB gamut. Now, the specified response time speed is 1ms (GtG – gray to gray pixel transition) when using the ‘Extreme’ overdrive mode, 2ms with ‘Super Fast,’ and 4ms with ‘Fast.’
So, if you’re wondering whether you should save your money and get the Dell AW2521HF or invest in one of the more expensive models, this review will cover everything you need to know! Image Quality First off, In the monitors settings I switched to the custom color preset mode. In this preset I tweaked the Offset to the following settings: Once you enable this technology, the monitor will change its refresh rate according to your FPS thus completely removing screen tearing and stuttering with imperceptible (~1ms) input lag penalty.
A highly responsive gaming monitor for enthusiasts with decent image quality as well
That said, when compared with a good 144Hz display, the AW2521H is a minor upgrade designed for a very specific type of player: seriously competitive esports enthusiasts. The 360Hz motion is a noticeable jump from 144Hz and 240Hz, however slight – I ran an ABX test myself – but for most people, it's not worth the few hundred extra dollars it currently costs. The amount of visible IPS glow varies across different units of monitors, but in all except the most extreme cases, it’s completely manageable. The image appears ‘rich and natural’ overall, with good variety. The gamma is slightly below target, brightening up some shades just a little, but the overall image balance is very respectable. We created out own LBL setting as described below. This provides effective blue light reduction and can easily be assigned to a numbered ‘Game’ preset for easy activation and deactivation. The monitor includes a range of ‘Preset Modes’; ‘Standard’, ‘FPS’, ‘MOBA/RTS’, ‘RPG’, ‘SPORTS’, ‘Game 1’, ‘Game 2’, ‘Game 3’, ‘ComfortView’, ‘Warm’, ‘Cool’ and ‘Custom Color’. The numbered ‘Game’ presets and ‘Custom Color’ are most flexible as they allow you to adjust the colour channels and saturation levels. The remaining presets make specific adjustments to those and can’t be manually altered. The numbered ‘Game’ presets can have unique ‘Brightness’ and ‘Contrast’ levels assigned to them as well, whereas this is set universally for the remaining presets. Many of the presets make further adjustments, such as ‘FPS’, ‘MOBA/RTS’, ‘RPG’ and ‘SPORTS’ adding a sharpness filter which can’t be disabled or counteracted effectively in the OSD aside from by selecting a different preset. These were briefly explored in the OSD video, but for the purposes of this table we’ll be looking at manual adjustments and settings we feel have more utility.
On Battlefield V the monitor provided a very fluid experience, where the frame rate kept pace with the 240Hz refresh rate. Compared to at 60Hz, or indeed a 60Hz monitor, you’re getting up to 4 times as much visual information pumped out every second. And twice as much when compared to 120Hz or 1.67 times as much compared to 144Hz. This gives an excellent ‘connected feel’, which describes the precision and fluidity felt when interacting with your character and the game world. The very low signal delay of this model also aided the ‘connected feel’, but the very high frame and refresh rate combination also helped. The perceived blur due to eye movement was also greatly reduced, much as demonstrated with the pursuit photos earlier on. The improvement in ‘connected feel’ and reduction in perceived blur was still noticeable to us and would be to sensitive users going up from 144Hz to 240Hz. Although not nearly as pronounced or obvious as stepping up from 60Hz to 144Hz (or even 120Hz). Strong pixel responsiveness overall, low input lag and Adaptive-Sync working well with both our AMD and Nvidia GPU Dell claims the Alienware 25 can hit up to 99% of the sRGB color space. It comes close in our tests, but in Standard mode, the monitor only reaches 96.8% of the gamut, as shown in the sRGB color-space diagram below...At 60Hz, above, the UFO appears soft without sharp focus or clear internal detailing. This reflects a moderate amount of perceived blur due to eye movement and is something shared with the reference screen. There is various degrees of trailing behind the UFOs due to pixel response time weaknesses. In this case, overshoot (inverse ghosting) including some colourful bright ‘halo’ trailing due to aggressive pixel overdrive. The ‘Fast’ setting only showed a relatively small amount of this, whilst the ‘Super Fast’ and ‘Extreme’ settings ramped this up. ‘Extreme’ in particular showed very strong and eye-catching overshoot. ‘VRR off’ did not significantly affect the pixel response behaviour at this refresh rate. The ‘Fast’ setting was quite close to the reference here, with slightly stronger but still by no means extreme overshoot. We therefore consider ‘Fast’ the optimal setting at 60Hz. The image below shows how things look with refresh rate bumped up to 144Hz. To test the performance of monitors, I run a DisplayCal verification using an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter, alongside a few by-eye tests using Lagom's LCD test patterns. The AW2521H is not an HDR or wide gamut monitor, instead hitting about 450 nits of maximum brightness and covering 92.8% of the sRGB color space. It is, however, extremely accurate within that sRGB space.
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