Could use a bit of advice..

terley · 16 Apr 2017 at 19:02

Genuinely cannot make my mind up...

Im struggling to see the benefits of spending the extra for the TN panels just based on the response time.. Aren't IPS displays supposed to be more expensive?

I am looking to purchase one of these over the next couple of weeks.. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

AOC - AGON AG271QG
165hz - IPS - GSYNC - 27" - 1440p - 4ms response time - £559.99

Asus - 27" ROG Swift PG278QR
165hz - TN - GSYNC - 27" - 1440p - 1ms response time - £611.99

Acer - Predator XB270HU
144hz - IPS - GSYNC - 27" - 1440p - 4ms response time - £529.99

DELL - S2716DG
144hz - TN - GSYNC - 27" - 1440p - 1ms response time - £689.99

System:
CPU - I7 6700k @ 4.6ghz
RAM - 16gb DDR4 Corsair LED @ 3000mhz
Motherboard - Gigabyte Z170X Ultra gaming
GPU - EVGA GTX 1080 FTW
PSU - EVGA G2 Supernova 650w

Its use:
FPS gaming, overwatch, CSGO.
Web development/scripting & coding, 1440p is the sweet spot for multitasking live preview + code editor.

Davanius · 16 Apr 2017 at 20:34

I am scratching my head trying to figure out why those tn's cost more than the ips screens.

Sorry but I would be going ips and the Acer predator would be my first pick.

eddiew · 17 Apr 2017 at 10:28

Does your web development work include doing visuals/images/colours? TN is not good for colour accuracy, definitely go IPS if you have any serious work that needs doing.

As for the price; because numbers sell. It's hard to explain colour gamuts to Joe Average, but a single number makes him feel empowered.

terley · 17 Apr 2017 at 13:31

eddiew said:
Does your web development work include doing visuals/images/colours? TN is not good for colour accuracy, definitely go IPS if you have any serious work that needs doing.

As for the price; because numbers sell. It's hard to explain colour gamuts to Joe Average, but a single number makes him feel empowered.

I will we doing primarily coding rather than design, although design will be a part of what i am doing it is hard to get hex colours wrong. I am leaning towards the AOC Argon as price wise it trumps the rest especially with its 165hz panel and the fact its IPS..

Davanius said:
I am scratching my head trying to figure out why those tn's cost more than the ips screens.

Sorry but I would be going ips and the Acer predator would be my first pick.

Same, thats what was throwing me so much, I would go for the acer predator but everywhere i look it seems to be listed as end of life or no longer stocked.. Including the popular rain forest.

eddiew · 17 Apr 2017 at 21:19

terley said:
I will we doing primarily coding rather than design, although design will be a part of what i am doing it is hard to get hex colours wrong. I am leaning towards the AOC Argon as price wise it trumps the rest especially with its 165hz panel and the fact its IPS..

Thing is you can really get a bad impression of how a site/application looks with TN. In some cases, you're dealing with 6-bit panels... My office fell into the budget TN trap about 5-6 years ago and we couldn't tell #111111 from #000000. Crushed all gradients into stripes. I accept that TN has a niche for competitive fps gaming, but I'd always recommend a second screen for all the other stuff people do :/

fr0sty · 20 Apr 2017 at 14:31

If i were you I'd start with the acer they are really nice if you get a good one. I've had 2 xb271hu monitors and they look gorgeous right outta the box or with minor tweaks. If you get a good one you'll be happy. It is the best priced and it would be very hard to get better picture quality regardless of how good other monitors are.

I have a ag271qg here at the minute and it's got bad bleeding. It's nowhere (and I mean nowhere) near as nice as the acer and it's not much cheaper either. Acer have went to the trouble of sending you a monitor with good settings. I've had that aoc and the tn ag271qx and I'll not be trying aoc again.

Actually on the ag271qg in overwatch there is screen tearing that I've not seen before on any other monitor and it looks awful. Any other monitor you could leave gsync off if you wanted on games like overwatch. Also aoc monitors have power bricks and a horrible OSD. The ag271qx is probably the worst quality monitor I've ever seen at that price. It takes ages to get it look half decent and the it looks like crap again in a different game.

I'm pretty fed up now but I'd love to try asus ips and tn out and also that Dell might be good but wow that price. I can't help but feel these monitors are all on borrowed time until a really good technology comes along to replace them, like oled seems to be.

It's either try and try to get a good/perfect ips or settle for second best for a very high end price. Man it sucks

terley · 20 Apr 2017 at 16:42

I'm starting to lean towards TN for the 1ms response time :|

I've got a 2560x1440 IPS display on my laptop that has very accurate colours if i needed to compare colours i guess.

fr0sty · 20 Apr 2017 at 17:34

terley said:
I'm starting to lean towards TN for the 1ms response time :|

I've got a 2560x1440 IPS display on my laptop that has very accurate colours if i needed to compare colours i guess.

Which tn are you gonna go for?

For some reason the ag271qg has noticeably more lag than the others I tried. I did see mentions of that online but everyone said it was only marginal compared to others. I would say it's quite a difference to other monitors. AOC are not a good brand in my opinion. The acer I didn't notice any unexpected lag so it was good.

I'm either gonna try 1 acer xb271hu a month until I get a good one or else try asus ips and tn out though that seems a bit of a nightmare again.

Banzai_Joe · 20 Apr 2017 at 17:58

IPS panels for better and consistent colour reproduction at much better angles than TN panels. TN panels for ultra quick refresh rate.
I bought IPS for our design studio for the reason above (obvs) especially if you have a small crowd of people looking over your should at what your showing them; at least the colour will be consistent from all angles.
Something that gaming monitors don't really need so they go for faster refreshing TN panels.

andybird123 · 20 Apr 2017 at 18:42

I've tried several of the TN/IPS gsync screens and the TN Asus is still my favourite - I game with the curtains closed or at night and the IPS screens have too much of a "glow" in the corners that I can't get rid of which makes them a non-starter for me playing dark games in a dark room... I still have another IPS screen and despite what everyone claims about TN screens being rubbish for colours, side by side I don't notice any difference in colours once I get them set up how I like (and using the lagom test images)

fr0sty · 22 Apr 2017 at 22:21

Terley, ive decided to order the S2716D and give it a shot. Im mulling over when to order it at the minute but I should have it by the end of next week one way or another. Reviews on big sites ive found to not agree with but user reviews/opinions ive found to be very accurate so based on that ive decided to stay away from Asus as they really do seem to be the kings of shocking QC. I'll report back when I get it, by that stage I will have tried all the monitors on ur list bar the asus

Not sure if youve ordered or not yet.

edit: ordered today, be here by tuesday most likely . Not sure how ocuk came up with that price tho..

fr0sty · 25 Apr 2017 at 20:41

Got the Dell today. At long last I'm happy

Really good monitor all round and I don't know how but it looks like the acer ips after a bit of tinkering. It's a bit better out of the box than some others but you can see the gamma is off. After using the rgb settings from tftcentral and the their icc profile it looked much better but still not right (for me) so I ditched the icc profile and changed the settings in nvidia control panel and now the gamma is darker again than tftcentral calibrated it to and I'd personally rather have it that way. Also a bit of digital vibrance and ur good to go.

None of the weird looking blury effects when scrolling Web pages up and down or moving windows around. The only problem I have with it is there is a clouding effect in dark scenes which I'm not keen on but comparing that to backlight bleed or ips glow ill live with it ok. Maybe a bit more tinkering or changing something if I am going to play a dark game. Either way I'll look more into it in the coming days

Also the Dell isn't styled for a 14 year old like acer and possibly a bit the aoc ones. The stand of acer doesn't actually look so bad in real life but the predator logo is a joke. Asus look fine of course but dell go one step further and give u a very nice understated design. The actually build is higher than acer the no bezel design looks better on the Dell monitor. Both have similar movement to portrait but the Dell is more sturdy on the desk.

Just my initial thoughts but think I'll be keeping this one

terley · 25 Apr 2017 at 20:55

fr0sty said:
Got the Dell today. At long last I'm happy Really good monitor all round and I don't know how but it looks like the acer ips after a bit of tinkering. It's a bit better out of the box than some others but you can see the gamma is off. After using the rgb settings from tftcentral and the their icc profile it looked much better but still not right (for me) so I ditched the icc profile and changed the settings in nvidia control panel and now the gamma is darker again than tftcentral calibrated it to and I'd personally rather have it that way. Also a bit of digital vibrance and ur good to go.

None of the weird looking blury effects when scrolling Web pages up and down or moving windows around. The only problem I have with it is there is a clouding effect in dark scenes which I'm not keen on but comparing that to backlight bleed or ips glow ill live with it ok. Maybe a bit more tinkering or changing something if I am going to play a dark game. Either way I'll look more into it in the coming days

Also the Dell isn't styled for a 14 year old like acer and possibly a bit the aoc ones. The stand of acer doesn't actually look so bad in real life but the predator logo is a joke. Asus look fine of course but dell go one step further and give u a very nice understated design. The actually build is higher than acer the no bezel design looks better on the Dell monitor. Both have similar movement to portrait but the Dell is more sturdy on the desk.

Just my initial thoughts but think I'll be keeping this one

So have you noticed a massive difference with the high refresh rate compared to 60hz? and how is the G-SYNC?

I've been stuck with a 1080p screen since i got my GTX 1080 and am really looking forward to using it properly on a decent screen. The only slight annoyance about the dell for me is a lack of speakers :| but i could buy some i suppose lol, i just don't like the additional wiring.

fr0sty · 25 Apr 2017 at 21:18

terley said:
So have you noticed a massive difference with the high refresh rate compared to 60hz? and how is the G-SYNC?

I've been stuck with a 1080p screen since i got my GTX 1080 and am really looking forward to using it properly on a decent screen. The only slight annoyance about the dell for me is a lack of speakers :| but i could buy some i suppose lol, i just don't like the additional wiring.

Yeah from using the first acer monitor I noticed that higher hz was a big improvement and ive struggled adjusting back to 60hz (its impossible to go back I feel). As for gsync, for some reason with acer I didnt even need it on but with the others I had screen tearing without it on, this is on Overwatch. Same as with Dell I have screen tearing at 144hz about 160fps in Overwatch, but enabling gsync instantly takes the tearing away on all the monitors. I know you can set up gsync better on games like overwatch but I havcent got that length yet. AOC have "really" bad tearing issues until you enable gsync im not sure why that is.

There are no words to descride how far away Dell is from AOC in every single department. There are so many negatives with aoc monitors I wouldnt know where to start, especially their TN one. Thankfull dell hasnt got any of these issues. Im glad my search is over but id like to have tried the benq xl2730z to compare to the aoc but ill not be doing that now. I dont think id ever bother going into asus lottery on either TN or IPS as the massively overwhelming negative feedback from the community is like nothing ive ever seen before for any hardware. Even if you get a good one which seems to require SERIOUS luck, they seem very prone to problems down the line too so I personally wouldnt risk it.

If I were you id order the Dell one and maybe one other of your chosing and try them both out, if you like the dell and not the other one then itll be pretty easy to sort out. Maybe try an Asus one out for youself.

fr0sty · 25 Apr 2017 at 21:22

Oh yeah and one more very important thing. The Dell monitor doesnt have that really ugly blurry coating on the screen. From reseach they did have it in the first revision or two but changed it to a much smoother anti-glare coating. Not sure what revision they changed that but I have an A04 which is the latest, although I didnt buy from ocuk cos their price is really crazy for this for some reason.

I would say on a pure white screen i cant notice the coating sitting normally. Really big thing this for me on the TN monitors as that blurry coating thing is awful looking.

hornetstinger · 25 Apr 2017 at 21:22

terley said:
So have you noticed a massive difference with the high refresh rate compared to 60hz? and how is the G-SYNC?

I've been stuck with a 1080p screen since i got my GTX 1080 and am really looking forward to using it properly on a decent screen. The only slight annoyance about the dell for me is a lack of speakers :| but i could buy some i suppose lol, i just don't like the additional wiring.

Who cares about speakers on a monitor. Get some £50 Wharfedale Diamond 9.0's and they'll poop over any flatscreen speakers.

fr0sty · 25 Apr 2017 at 21:39

hornetstinger said:
Who cares about speakers on a monitor. Get some £50 Wharfedale Diamond 9.0's and they'll poop over any flatscreen speakers.

The speakers on them all are a bit crap. The iphone has better speakers lol. I usually use headphones but its nice to have built in speakers once in a while to watch youtube or whatever and take a break from the headphones. They provide a very basic sound and you couldnt listen to music on them or anything like that.