The guide that is embossed into the front of the monitor is also fairly hard to see, which is both a positive and a negative.

A bit of banding on colour gradients was also introduced due to the further gamma corrections needed at a profile level [ detailed calibration report]. This does leave slightly more space between images on adjacent monitors, and while it is not something I have found to bother me much, it’s worth mentioning. Despite being a budget gaming monitor, it maintains many of the features you’d see on higher end Asus gaming monitors. The table included shows then the average G2G response time measured at several refresh rates, along with the optimal overdrive setting we found.

You do need to then turn sharpness down a bit, and the colour saturation setting as suggested in our table, but we felt the overall image looked better and we achieved slightly better results from our calibration process [ detailed report].

We also measure the post-calibration contrast ratio in case that has been impacted during the corrections. The bottom bezel is a fair bit thicker, as is the case with most monitors, with a grey AOC logo in the middle and two red edges along the bottom in a clean satin red. It had a very good default setup, high contrast ratio for an IPS panel and the kind of all round performance you’d expect from this technology. You get a little bit here on the darker transitions still, but overall the level of black smearing was very low for a panel like this. Competitive gamers will love this colour-accurate 27" IPS display with its smooth 144 Hz refresh rate, 1 ms MPRT response time and FreeSync Premium support.We would recommend trying to ensure your system is powerful enough to consistently deliver in the 100 – 144Hz range if possible. The longer that off period (or rather, the shorter the “on” period) the more potential blur reduction you would experience in theory. Recommended OSD settings – our calibrated settings to reach an optimal hardware setup, aiming for 2.