New Dell IPS S2721DGF 165hz gaming monitor

Mine arrived this morning. First time running on 1440p! Setting it up just right is taking a while, though. Red saturation is insane, so toned it down to 40% on the Custom Colour profile. Gain is R95, G100, B100. Brightness and Contrast are on the factory settings (75 each). Looks "OK" for now, but might tweak a bit more. If only there was a way to transfer settings between monitors!
 
The Voice said:
The Dell seems to have better reviews when directly compared, even though it uses the LG's panel.
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The Dell isn't without its downsides.

No sRGB clamp.
No ability to accept a 4K signal (and downscale it).

Depends on your usage if that bothers you at all.

It's a nice screen, and frankly I loathe the LG stand, as I think it looks absolute garbage :p The Dell aesthetic is much nicer.

But other than that they perform within a few % of each other in terms of response times, contrast, etc.
 
FoxEye said:
For what? They're very similar with the same LG panel and everything.

Some minor differences do exist.

Both have been available a while and there are plenty of reviews of both of them.
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I read the Dell is just a vastly upgrade from the LG, even has higher refresh rate (not like it makes a difference). I want to get the Dell 240hz but i don't think my 5800x rtx 3070 fe will even be cable of maintaing that many frames to benefit from it lol
 
Samhfx said:
I read the Dell is just a vastly upgrade from the LG, even has higher refresh rate (not like it makes a difference). I want to get the Dell 240hz but i don't think my 5800x rtx 3070 fe will even be cable of maintaing that many frames to benefit from it lol
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They're very similar so no, not a huge upgrade.

However a 3070 FE should be plenty to drive 1440p at >100 FPS in many games, settings dependent. So you don't need to be worried about that, at least.

Both are good monitors, as is the Gigabyte M27Q and the MSI MAG27QRF-QD. All IPS, all >100hz, good pixel response times.

There are differences between them but those differences may or may not be important to you. Ie, if you don't plan to connect a PS5, you probably don't care about accepting (and downscaling) a 4K signal. If you don't care about oversaturated colours, you might not worry about a missing sRGB clamp.

But both of the two you mentioned are good monitors generally and around ~£300 are decent value.
 
FoxEye said:
The Dell isn't without its downsides.

No sRGB clamp.
No ability to accept a 4K signal (and downscale it).

Depends on your usage if that bothers you at all.

It's a nice screen, and frankly I loathe the LG stand, as I think it looks absolute garbage :p The Dell aesthetic is much nicer.

But other than that they perform within a few % of each other in terms of response times, contrast, etc.
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Yes, performance-wise they're pretty close (same panel after all). The reviews do seem to put the Dell ahead at the end of the day, possibly because of the aesthetics (and have to say I agree with them on that point).
 
The monitor has minimal backlight bleed and glow (unavoidable with high res, high refresh rate IPS - you've just won the panel lottery if you don't have any). My only gripe at the moment is that for the life of me I can't seem to get the whites, well, white. Any ideas of what the Gain settings for that might be? I'm using the default ICC profile that came with the driver fyi.
 
FoxEye said:
They're very similar so no, not a huge upgrade.

However a 3070 FE should be plenty to drive 1440p at >100 FPS in many games, settings dependent. So you don't need to be worried about that, at least.

Both are good monitors, as is the Gigabyte M27Q and the MSI MAG27QRF-QD. All IPS, all >100hz, good pixel response times.

There are differences between them but those differences may or may not be important to you. Ie, if you don't plan to connect a PS5, you probably don't care about accepting (and downscaling) a 4K signal. If you don't care about oversaturated colours, you might not worry about a missing sRGB clamp.

But both of the two you mentioned are good monitors generally and around ~£300 are decent value.
Click to expand...

Would a 240hz monitor be a waste for my specs? I occasionally like to play fps games competitively, is it worth the investment having 240hz?
 
Samhfx said:
Would a 240hz monitor be a waste for my specs? I occasionally like to play fps games competitively, is it worth the investment having 240hz?
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I haven't experienced a 240hz monitor, but it is perhaps generally held that above 144hz is diminishing returns territory.

Pro eSports players might benefit from 240hz but I'm not sure many of the rest of us would. I'd personally prioritise other things.

That kind of question is hard to give a definitive answer to tho. It's kind of personal preference. Some people are sure they can see a difference between 144hz and 240hz, others not so much.
 
FoxEye said:
I haven't experienced a 240hz monitor, but it is perhaps generally held that above 144hz is diminishing returns territory.

Pro eSports players might benefit from 240hz but I'm not sure many of the rest of us would. I'd personally prioritise other things.

That kind of question is hard to give a definitive answer to tho. It's kind of personal preference. Some people are sure they can see a difference between 144hz and 240hz, others not so much.
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I'm going to get a dell 165hz I think
 
I've just ordered one of these from Dell to replace my P2421D, i'll be using it for work and gaming (when i can get the parts) so be interesting to see how it compares to my current one in terms of PQ.

Will report back my findings once i've set it up!
 
d
The Mike said:
The thing is, when I replaced my old monitor with the new, it worked flawless for like 7 days.
It was fantastic.
After I updated my nvidia drivers the saturation was all over the place and the colors as well.
The weird thing is even though I made a clean driver install I always just ran with the standard settings, but for some reason it just went crazy.

My red is like neon, and I quickly get eye strain after the update. Everything feels oversaturated. Dark brightness yet explosive colors. It really annoys me as the monitor was perfect before and I don't know why it did that. I have tried to reroll the drivers back but alas.
I tried adjusting color temp with flux, and it seem to have helped a bit. But I really miss the monitor was perfect out of the box.
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did you ever find a fix? i got the monitor today my red looks neon and it's horrible :(
 
OK. So I've had to learn a LOT about monitors in the past week just to get mine to sort of where I need it to be (I'm still tweaking it here and there).

No matter what I did, the colours (red and pink/purple especially) just didn't seem right. Even turning down the saturation didn't seem to sort it out, and I had an issue with everything seeming a bit washed out, too. Blacks seemed more grey, and white was just still way off. Scoured the internet (not all that many seem to have this monitor yet, or at least, have solutions to their issues), and slowly started losing my mind - I was getting ready to box it up and send it back (I even thought about buying a colourimiter)!

Luckily, I saved myself about £150. Here's what I did (your mileage may vary as all panels seem to be calibrated differently at the factory, and your personal preferences may be completely different anyway):

  1. ICC Profile: sRGB IEC61966-2.1 - I tried other ICC profiles (the Dell one that came with the driver was the first - a custom profile from a reviewer was another). They were OK, but for some reason every time I opened a web page that had a large amount of Red on it (Skysports, for example), the Red would shift to an Orange shade after a couple of seconds. Worst part was when I noticed it for the first time - I simply could never unsee it! I also support a football team whose kit is Red, so visiting their page started making me question my allegiance. I then noticed that Green did it, too. So, I settled on the sRGB profile, which didn't shift any of my colours and that, well, works. Important thing about custom ICC profiles from reviewers, and even the manufacturer, is that it has been calibrated to their panel, and even though you may have the exact same model, it's the individual panel that matters here.
  2. Contrast: 90 - this helped separate the blacks and make them look, well, more black.
  3. Brightness: 77 - about as high as I can comfortably push it before it starts burning my retina. 75 (default) and lower just makes the whole screen seem way too dark for my liking.
  4. Preset Modes: Custom Colour - allows you to fine-tune the colours, and I found the rest of the presets not to my taste, anyway.
  5. Gain: R = 91, G = 90, B = 96 - got the White temp to just about where I want it (see: retina).
  6. Saturation: R = 40, G = 40, B = 45, C = 50, M = 30, Y = 45 - the absolute worst offender was Magenta (made every Pink/Purple shade look like Hot Pink), followed by Red. The only default is Cyan. After 1-6, which literally took me hours to work through, something still didn't seem right. And then I randomly stumbled across a post somewhere that mentioned...
  7. Hue: R = 55, G = 45, B = 55, C = 50, M = 60, Y = 50. Again, Magenta was the worst - it was just so off, with Pinks looking more Purple. Red was also a lot colder than I liked, too. Ultimately, how I got this part done was to set my up old monitor (Dell U2415) next to this one, and literally just go colour-by-colour until I'd matched them to what I was used to. Finally, the colours looked way more natural! Well, to my eyes, anyway. I get this is a "gaming" monitor, but damnit, Dell, the out-of-box colours are insane! One would assume that the shades would at least have been accurate.
I hope that this helps someone out there. Again, note that all the above settings are completely personal, but at least now you'll know what to look out for when you get there. Honestly, while I'm happy to finally have the monitor I spent almost £400 on looking mostly right (it performs amazingly well at 1440p and 165hz with Freesync), I'm quite disappointed at how much time I had to spend just getting it right just because the default settings were so far off. Especially considering that a monitor I had spent far less money on 4 years ago worked right out of the box without having to touch anything ever.

Edit: might be worth mentioning. I have the S2721DGFA (only difference to the DGF is that this one has new firmware apparently - and has had the brightness set lower because of EU regulations, but is still somehow a G-rated energy product) and am using an RX 6700 XT on the latest AMD drivers. When I first got it, I was running it on a GTX 1070 with the latest nVidia drivers - neither card or driver seemed to affect my colours in any way.
 
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The Voice said:
OK. So I've had to learn a LOT about monitors in the past week just to get mine to sort of where I need it to be (I'm still tweaking it here and there).

No matter what I did, the colours (red and pink/purple especially) just didn't seem right. Even turning down the saturation didn't seem to sort it out, and I had an issue with everything seeming a bit washed out, too. Blacks seemed more grey, and white was just still way off. Scoured the internet (not all that many seem to have this monitor yet, or at least, have solutions to their issues), and slowly started losing my mind - I was getting ready to box it up and send it back (I even thought about buying a colourimiter)!

Luckily, I saved myself about £150. Here's what I did (your mileage may vary as all panels seem to be calibrated differently at the factory, and your personal preferences may be completely different anyway):

  1. ICC Profile: sRGB IEC61966-2.1 - I tried other ICC profiles (the Dell one that came with the driver was the first - a custom profile from a reviewer was another). They were OK, but for some reason every time I opened a web page that had a large amount of Red on it (Skysports, for example), the Red would shift to an Orange shade after a couple of seconds. Worst part was when I noticed it for the first time - I simply could never unsee it! I also support a football team whose kit is Red, so visiting their page started making me question my allegiance. I then noticed that Green did it, too. So, I settled on the sRGB profile, which didn't shift any of my colours and that, well, works. Important thing about custom ICC profiles from reviewers, and even the manufacturer, is that it has been calibrated to their panel, and even though you may have the exact same model, it's the individual panel that matters here.
  2. Contrast: 90 - this helped separate the blacks and make them look, well, more black.
  3. Brightness: 77 - about as high as I can comfortably push it before it starts burning my retina. 75 (default) and lower just makes the whole screen seem way too dark for my liking.
  4. Preset Modes: Custom Colour - allows you to fine-tune the colours, and I found the rest of the presets not to my taste, anyway.
  5. Gain: R = 91, G = 90, B = 96 - got the White temp to just about where I want it (see: retina).
  6. Saturation: R = 40, G = 40, B = 45, C = 50, M = 30, Y = 45 - the absolute worst offender was Magenta (made every Pink/Purple shade look like Hot Pink), followed by Red. The only default is Cyan. After 1-6, which literally took me hours to work through, something still didn't seem right. And then I randomly stumbled across a post somewhere that mentioned...
  7. Hue: R = 55, G = 45, B = 55, C = 50, M = 60, Y = 50. Again, Magenta was the worst - it was just so off, with Pinks looking more Purple. Red was also a lot colder than I liked, too. Ultimately, how I got this part done was to set my up old monitor (Dell U2415) next to this one, and literally just go colour-by-colour until I'd matched them to what I was used to. Finally, the colours looked way more natural! Well, to my eyes, anyway. I get this is a "gaming" monitor, but damnit, Dell, the out-of-box colours are insane! One would assume that the shades would at least have been accurate.
I hope that this helps someone out there. Again, note that all the above settings are completely personal, but at least now you'll know what to look out for when you get there. Honestly, while I'm happy to finally have the monitor I spent almost £400 on looking mostly right (it performs amazingly well at 1440p and 165hz with Freesync), I'm quite disappointed at how much time I had to spend just getting it right just because the default settings were so far off. Especially considering that a monitor I had spent far less money on 4 years ago worked right out of the box without having to touch anything ever.

Edit: might be worth mentioning. I have the S2721DGFA (only difference to the DGF is that this one has new firmware apparently - and has had the brightness set lower because of EU regulations, but is still somehow a G-rated energy product) and am using an RX 6700 XT on the latest AMD drivers. When I first got it, I was running it on a GTX 1070 with the latest nVidia drivers - neither card or driver seemed to affect my colours in any way.
Click to expand...

I tried everything you posted. The reds and green look more tolerable but all the colours look extremely pale and washed out for me. The only solution I can come up with for myself is setting the gamma in nvidia control panel to 0.70 rather than having it on default. It makes the black less grey but the reds and greens still look like neon, how would I go about fixing red/green colours being extremely bright compared to other colours?
 
Samhfx said:
I tried everything you posted. The reds and green look more tolerable but all the colours look extremely pale and washed out for me. The only solution I can come up with for myself is setting the gamma in nvidia control panel to 0.70 rather than having it on default. It makes the black less grey but the reds and greens still look like neon, how would I go about fixing red/green colours being extremely bright compared to other colours?
Click to expand...

Probably need to dial down Saturation a bit.
 
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