These days, the top gaming monitors offer crazy fast refresh rates. After all, in lots of games, whether you win or lose can come down to how fast your reactions are – and a super fast monitor helps with that. Asus’s latest esports-grade monitor is absurdly fast, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
Asus’s new ROG Strix Ace XG248QSG offers a 610 Hz refresh rate display. That’s not a typo, it really is 610Hz. It marks the brand’s latest entry into the great refresh rate arms race, with a name as ridiculous as the specs.
It’s got a native 600Hz refresh rate and can be overclocked to 610Hz, just in case your reflexes are faster than the speed of light. Asus is clearly aiming this thing at the esports crowd – the kind who twitch headshots into existence. But it comes with one really big downside, and that’s the panel tech on the inside.
This kind of speed comes at the expense of panel quality, because Asus has decided to dust off TN technology for this monitor. Not just any TN panel, but a Super TN panel. That’s marketing speak for “it’s still a TN panel, but we pinky promise it looks a bit less pants now.” You seen, TN panels are known for pretty poor colour accuracy (a tendency to yellow, to be precise) and viewing angles that don’t tend to cooperate. So that’s characters that look jaundiced that you can’t see unless you’re facing dead-on.
Apparently, this Super TN panel offers better brightness at 370 nits, and covers 90% of DCI-P3. While that’s impressive if true for a TN panel, it’s a far cry from the best gaming monitors kicking around. Asus also packed in ELMB2 (Extreme Low Motion Blur 2), AI visual boosts, and dynamic crosshairs, to try and compensate for the lacklustre image.
Now, don’t get me wrong – there’s clearly some proper engineering muscle behind this thing. A 0.1 ms response time, input lag under one millisecond, and support for both FreeSync Premium and G-Sync is nothing to scoff at. And the 24.1-inch FHD panel size is right in the sweet spot for serious competitive play. But still, it’s hard to ignore that TN panel. A really fast one, sure, but TN nonetheless.
The monitor’s design is fairly muted – a matte black affair with no RGB nonsense. I’m a little surprised by that for something in the ROG line-up, but I guess the lights would have been too much to cram in. You do get decent ergonomics though: height, swivel, and tilt adjustments are all here. Connectivity is handled by two HDMI 2.1 ports, a DisplayPort 1.4, headphone jack, and a USB-C port.
If you’re eyeing up one of these beasts, Asus hasn’t revealed details yet. We don’t know how much it’ll cost nor when you’ll be able to order it. But it’s safe to assume this won’t be a bargain-bin special.
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