I’m not the best at reviewing monitors, CPUs, GPUs, or anything that needs lots of graphs, comparisons, statistics, and whatnot. I can give you my honest opinion as someone who’s picky about their displays, however. I purchased a second monitor to go on top of my 34″ ultrawide as I was tired of games not being natively supported for 21:9 ratios. This way I could play games in ultrawide or 16:9 and it wouldn’t matter anymore. I also wanted something that had G-Sync and looked bright, crisp, and had great color.

First off, I have to say that the HDR400 is pretty useless right off the bat. Sadly, Windows 10 doesn’t have a feature for HDR400 (8-bit HDR) to auto-detect it when games are running. You either have to turn HDR on all the time or leave it off, and the pay-off for that inconvenience isn’t worth it. HDR is barely noticeable on this monitor, but I won’t knock it too hard for that as I didn’t get this monitor for HDR anyways.

The fact that this monitor is 280hz at 1080p is pretty amazing. While higher-end games won’t ever get that framerate, graphically simple games like CS: GO, Overwatch, Warcraft, and any game made before 2015 might run that high if you have a GPU capable of it. The monitor has Asus’ own anti-blur tech built-in, and unless your games are over 60FPS it won’t’ do you any good, but I honestly didn’t see a huge difference with it enabled. There are various other OSD settings like better dark levels which is a must. Dark areas resonate and pop more with this setting enabled. There are other various presets as well, but the Racing default out of the box was just fine. This is a well-calibrated monitor out of the box which is always nice. Once you get a calibrated profile off of tftcentral and calibrate it via the recommended settings the monitor seemed less bright and the colors looked really good.

Physically, the monitor is nothing special. The base has a weird red ring that I mistook for lighting up, but it does have a vertical arm that the monitor can slide up and down on. I personally mounted the monitor to my desk and the 100×100 VESA mount was just fine. The buttons are easy to get to, but the monitor has a long wake-up time and when I first plugged it in I thought my monitor was dead. My ultrawide wakes up instantly, but this one takes almost 10 seconds, at least on DisplayPort. I also liked the power brick that was supplied. It has a barrel plug and the brick is round and flat almost like a laptop brick and can be easily tucked away.

When playing games the monitor was bright and sharp and crisp. Even at the low 60FPS end things looked good, and at 280FPS things just fly and I didn’t notice any smearing or ghosting. G-Sync of course is the way to go for best responsiveness and removing all tearing. There are minor issues with IPS panels like edge bleeding and it’s not the brightest monitor, only 400 nits, but it looks fine in bright and dark rooms. Overall, this is a great monitor for the price range and I don’t have many complaints.