Purchased this monitor last week and finally got to play with it over the weekend. Mine had a May manufacturing date which concerned me a bit until I checked the service menu and noted a V002 firmware. Sweet!
Anyway, there are numerous positives from my old Hazro 27" IPS screen. I love the 144hz refresh rate (a lot less blurry than the Hazro) and how customisable the entire screen is. I also like that my monitor has virtually zero backlight bleed at all and no more IPS glow! These two issues were so distracting on the Hazro and got worse over time. In addition, being a true 8-bit panel the colours are just as good as the Hazro and the TN screen is actually not that bad in terms of off-centre viewing (up to a point of course). It's much better than old laptops I had with TN screens where you moved like 1/2" and all contrast and detail was lost. You can move horizontally quite a ways before you notice any colour shift or contrast loss, although vertically you are a bit more limited. However, this isn't an issue when you have such a great monitor stand that can move the screen up, down pivot, etc.
In my haste to enjoy all of the features of this monitor I picked up a 2nd 7970 off of eBay for a shade over £100 but I didn't realise that the 7970s didn't support Freesync! I'm running both cards at stock voltage at 1000MHz core / 1500 MHz memory (consistent with GHz edition cards) and the framerate increase in most games is fantastic. Crossfire scaling is also very good and the only game where it really suffers seems to be in Wolfenstein The New Order (but that entire game on PC is a mess) which doesn't officially support crossfire, and in Crysis 2 (which I don't play anymore anyway) which sees like mid 70's % scaling.
So long as my framerate is above about 70 I don't notice any stuttering and luckily most games stay above that 95% of the time. The only game I have in which I notice the FPS dropping below this is 60Hz limited games like the two mentioned above (although 60Hz limited games don't stutter with 144Hz refresh enabled), and in Tomb Raider during close-up cutscenes of Laura with TressFX enabled.
Anyway, overall I'm pretty happy with this monitor and mostly I'm glad to be rid of backlight leakage and IPS glow as it was really bothersome for me. However, I want to try Freesync but I will just have to wait for GPU prices to come down a bit before upgrading again since I can't justify spending another £500 on a single GPU right now.
Despite this, I do wonder whether or not I should return the screen and wait a bit longer to give me more flexibility in my next GPU upgrade if I decide Nvidia is worth it.
Finally home from holidays and BenQ came through with the RMA. WoW what a beautiful monitor this is. Just gotta get my hands on a Fury/Fury X card for the Freesync and it will be perfect.
