Cheap monitors suck right? WRONG!

[Music] what's up guys j2cents here and today we're going to talk about some more low-cost options for your gaming setups um today we're taking a look at the viewsonic xg2405 they did sponsor this video and send us this particular monitor um i've not taken a look at it yet but i figure since we're a huge fan of their elite series that we've been using you guys have seen it i figured we'd take a look at what some of their lower options are and check it out has birds okay so the xg2405 let's talk about some of the main specs first maybe we'll explain what some of the specs are if you are kind of shopping for monitors there's a lot of tape on this if you're kind of shopping for monitors for the first time also too if you hear our heater going it is cold we did forget to turn it on last night before we left and uh you know 60 degrees fahrenheit in socal man that's uh that's parka weather so we had to turn the heater on sorry about the noise snow boots i mean that's why i'm wearing a sweater some of the main specs on this it is a 1080p panel so fhd full hd which isn't full anymore these days which is kind of funny it is a 144 hertz ips one millisecond response time the more budget monitors now are starting to have a lot of the features that you would only find on you know hundreds and hundreds of dollars uh you know monitors that sentence wow you would usually find that on monitors that cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars there we go so right now at the time i'm making this video and i'm gonna go right into pricing because this might keep some people interested at b h photo you can get this exact panel for 179 to put things into perspective a panel of this nature it's also a 24 inch panel when i was uh first getting into high refresh rate panels to get a monitor that was a tn panel with remember this is ips would have cost me 300 six years ago back in 2014 when i first started you know playing around with some of the high refresh rate stuff so you would get terrible color recreation you would get um again 144 hertz and then one millisecond response time now the response time is how fast it takes that pixel to go from on to off and there's there's different ways to measure that whether it's black to black or gray to gray usually the measurements are in gray to gray but that means you're not going to get ghosting on the screen and then the refresh rate is just how many times the screen can refresh the image per second that's a very simple way of putting it so with graphics cards becoming as powerful as they are today having a 1080p panel at 144 hertz means it's going to be perfect for shooters it's going to be perfect for uh any sort of esports title that where fps matters because remember fps can have a direct relation to your input lag so getting higher fps without screen tearing and having a buttery smooth image whether it be 1080p or higher resolution is going to be a win-win for basically anyone and as you can see putting it together is very simple the base is in one piece the stand is in one piece it's got a captive screw on here so that you don't lose it it's got a little flip out handle just tighten this down and then you are assembled 24 inch view sonic xg2405 now it does also come included with an hdmi cable because of high refresh rate i highly recommend that you run a displayport cable however with hdmi 2.0 uh you can actually run 144hz at 1080p over a standard hdmi that's not a problem if you're running higher resolutions though you're going to have to run a displayport cable i'm also going to have to run a displayport cable because the pc i'm gonna be testing this with today is my star wars themed case mod that i did that only has displayport on its outputs it's got three inputs so it's got uh two hdmis and one of course it's got an internal power supply which is nice because that means there's no inline brick to worry about you have to worry about hiding a brick or anything it's not the thinnest of panels but as you can see it's not super thick or fat either if you want to mount this on arm you can it's also a vaso 100 so you would undo these screws right here there's four of them and then the panel would come off you can mount your vasa arm and have it mounted to a wall have it mounted to an arm on your desk or just use it as it comes so let's get this thing fired up let's take a look at the color let's take a look at some of the refresh rates we'll show you how to activate a high refresh rate panel and maybe your first time ever using one you may have one now and not even have it activated and don't even know because if you've never seen higher than 60 fps you probably don't even know you're missing out on it not gonna lie there's people who've asked me before i have this panel this is a high refresh rate panel it's like yes and they're like how do i turn it on and they've had it for like a year and never even turned on higher than 60. so we'll show you guys how to do all that in a minute now in terms of cable management it does come with this little guy right here which i think i just did upside down there we go so that's a little clip that will just hold on to some of your cables which can then keep it in line with the base so if you're putting it on a desk or something and it's like that then you're not going to really see the cables so just want to show you guys that that part is uh actually separate you got to put that on all right so first things first i'm going to talk about the built-in speakers uh very rarely are built-in speakers in a monitor worth using or talking about um in fact these i love you sonic but they're terrible you can't hear them at all with our ac going i thought they weren't working and that [Music] yeah in fact i might they're so bad i think it would be worth like troubleshooting at that point to say okay i have sound working with my system however it does have a 3.5 millimeter jack built into them so if you have the display port or audio cable being used as your audio interface instead of having to run then a you know power and cable all the way to your computer you can use these or this three and a half millimeter jack in here to pass through your audio that way then you have a much shorter run to your speakers which now these are just little like five dollar amazon basics or amazon uh what amazon basics are they called yeah look at that let's just go to the best channel in the world jay's two cents how you spell it yeah and then let's see drama cool so we were using the monitor now as an audio page so something worth pointing out that's what that jack is for i wouldn't recommend using it for headphones because if the headphones are plugged in then they're going to go to the headphones and if you want to unplug the headphones let's paint the butt you could just use the headphone jack right here on these remember these are terrible terrible speakers i just wanted to show how the pass-through works now let's go and talk about the color it's ips so the color looks fantastic i've not touched the color profile i've not gone on here in here and adjusted any of that you can change the particular modes um so we've got standard which is which is what we're in now fps game rts game moba these are just different like color profiles wow so fps game made it very contrasty uh rts game yeah i would probably just not use that one same with that uh let's see what movie does so it actually mutes a lot of the color it looks a little bit more like a like a cinema grade so this web that's like a little bit more punchy in colors very i don't like it you guys see the icon you guys probably can't tell on the camera but the icons are a little bit more it looks like the vibrance has been turned up text i assume that's going to make text look a little more clear if you're doing like yeah so what that does is it brings down the the overall brightness so that if you're looking at like a word document or something of the white background you're not going to be blinding yourself so i honestly think standard is just the best i think it looked the best on standard so let's go and talk about refresh rate there's a website that you guys can go to here and it's just a ufo monitor test and if you guys want to sort of follow along with your particular system you can do that so this is a free website where it just has this different this little uf ufo guy going across the screen at different refresh rates or frame rates so you've got 60fps which you can see a smooth but what you may not be able to tell by looking at on camera but you should open up another window maybe look at this alongside our video you'll be able to see the blur happening at 60fps you can see the judder happening at 30 and then obviously the terrible fps of 15 showing how much it moves in between each frame which gives it a very stuttery look so the higher frame rate it's going to give you a smoother effect obviously now we're only set to 60 fps right now so this is where a lot of people don't know where to go and change their fps now you can do it in your driver you can go into nvidia control panel and do it you can go into amd radeon software and do it i prefer to do it inside windows because sometimes you see options that don't necessarily show up to you like if you look right here this inside the control panel for nvidia stops at 120 hertz so it gives you all these increments 23 24 25 29 30 50 59 60 100 119 120. so it gives you all of those options but if we go into the control panel for windows and hit right click display settings come down here to advanced display settings then click display adapter properties and then click yeah they should make this a little easier then click monitor then you can see screen refresh rate now we were only set to 60 right now but as you can see in here we get the option for our 144. so the monitor is clearly reporting back like hey i'm a 144hz panel for some reason nvidia doesn't see the options so you can enable it here it now detects that we have 144hz panel so you can see 144 shows up and then half of that and then half of that again because it's always showing uh half rate at that point so you can see just how smooth the 144 is now so i'm wondering how many people watching this video right now maybe didn't even know they had a higher refresh rate panel than than they currently have because of the fact that windows will only go to 60fps automatically now if you have a high refresh rate panel and those options aren't showing up it means that your cable probably does not support the bandwidth needed for the refresh rate and that resolution so remember if you're trying to push more frames at that resolution you need more bandwidth because that's way more data so if you're trying to push 120 fps at 1080p versus 60 that's obviously double the amount of data that needs to be transferred so the hdmi standard thing now is 18 gigabit per second and it's going up obviously because of 8k displayport uh 1.4 is going to obviously unlock all of those options for you 144 hertz 4k even so if you're running displayport it's why i recommend it because then you don't have the older usb standard holding you back hdmi i just wanted to see how it was going to look at 144 i'm not really seeing any sort of ghosting i'm not seeing any trailing so that tells us that our one millisecond uh it's probably close to that it's funny those numbers are very um advertiser if you will there's a lot of discussion about what a true one millisecond looks like a lot of panels will i think in my opinion anything five millisecond or below is acceptable um we showed you guys before what a high refresh rate panel with a slow response time looks like it smudges all across the screen because remember this shows how many pixels per frame it's moving so if we're moving seven pixels to the right every time it redraws a frame if the previous pixels haven't refreshed fast enough which is the response time then you'll see some of that fading out image as it moves which is then going to give you like a trail behind the the ufo and it's very obvious on this website if you have a high refresh rate panel with a slow response time it'll it'll smear all across the screen so that's why we like this website it's just test ufo.com all right so let's talk about tearing because that's the other aspect since we were just talking about g-sync and freesync what g-sync and freesync are designed to do is to make the frame rate smoother if you fall below the refresh rate of the panel so that's designed to smooth out the frame rates that way it doesn't look juddery or or jerky as the frame rates are fluctuating now tearing because the screen is drawn from top to bottom when you do do a quick motion like that because the frame on the panel can't refresh as fast as the data is being sent to it because we have sync technology turned off right now you would see the screen then split apart from top to bottom depending on how fast the frame is currently drawing how fast the data is being sent to it the colors look great they look accurate because it's ips panel if this was tn you would see like as i turn the panel like this you would see major color shift but if you take a look sideways here as i turn it and it is a swivel base by the way you can see we are not getting any color shift sure you get a little bit of an off viewing angle sort of a dimming but that's just because of the nature of the fact that it's one led backlit which is edge lit technically we'll take a look at backlighting in a second here it is reflecting off of a foil that's lighting our scene and because we have a matte finish here when you turn sideways you do get some dimming just because of the nature of the way the panel is constructed um the only time you're never going to get dimming when you look at it sideways is if you're looking at like an oled screen but clearly oleds on desktop monitors is not a widespread thing yet so let's go ahead and talk about the lighting here one of the downfalls in my opinion of backlit lcds and yes this is an lcd panel an ips lcd that is led lit there's a lot of misconception between lcd people think lcd is the panel type and that's true but there's there's multiple layers of what's happening here with the way a panel is constructed there's fluorescent lcd which is the older much thicker flat panel technology would have a light back here basically like a fluorescent tube or a cold cathode kind of zigzagged back behind here which would give you very uneven lighting an led technology being uh much brighter much lower energy much longer life and also much smaller allows you to get thin panels like this now with even lighting but what we're going to look for here is any sort of flashlight effect flashlight effect refers to the corners typically the corners on lcd panels are the brightest because that's where the lighting takes a turn remember i said it's edge lit so you'll get more lights right here focusing in an area on the corners than say the center of the panel so you'll get this bright edge versus a darker center simply because of the fact that the way that the lighting is is uh this also does not have any sort of local dimming which is something that you would see to get a higher contrast ratio where if you had a dark scene it would dynamically dim that particular panel zone to make the contrast a little bit better the darks darker the brights brighter but this does not have any of that which in my opinion is fine i am not a fan of local dimming whatsoever alright so this is just a solid black image so depending on the viewing angle and i'll sort of turn this it's pretty uniform it's not too blotchy you can see though right here in this corner depending on the angle keep your eyes right here there's a little bit of a light bleed happening right there depending on how you look at it so from this angle you can't really see it but watch as i turn it this way you can see it sort of appeared the corners though surprisingly are very evenly lit you don't see any uh flashlighting happening here in the corner and they call it flash lighting because it literally looks like the beam of a flashlight and you'll see it jut out from all corners so here's what gray looks like and you can see that gray is pretty uniform it doesn't look bad at all so that's why when once you have some sort of color and other things happening on the screen the slight amount of bleeding that you see on the corners or even on the edge that was there is completely gone man this has come a long way this was a tn panel as we turn it you would see it like rainbowing and stuff tn panel you're either gonna have terrible off viewing axis angles or height problems where if you're not looking at it straight on it's just a really like tin foily mess the fact that you can now get an ips panel that's 144 hertz one millisecond response time free sync technology for under 200 is just absolutely astonishing in my opinion anyway and this is coming from someone that has been like i don't care about panel tech to i'm a complete panel snob i think that says something one other thing i forgot to point out is it is obviously height adjustable and swivelable but i can't swivel it all the way around because of the cables that are in there so you could make this a vertical panel next to you if you're a programmer or something and you want a vertical panel so you can see a long long code then you can do that so that's what makes a panel like this perfect for anyone that use wants to use it for a vertical format because if you run a tn panel or something and you turn it like that then the viewing angles become completely obvious that they are not intended for that but you know i think it shows that we've obviously come a long way where you can get a lot of tech crammed into a panel now for not having to spend a lot of money that's because of ultra wides becoming uh you know so such high popularity now you've got 1440p panels and 4k panels really starting to become more normal 1080p which is still perfectly fine for i think most anybody i would personally take a lower resolution like 1080p to get the other stats of the high refresh rate the low response time uh the ips color over a higher resolution at say 60 you know it's locked at 60p or whatever so i think it's a panel you definitely should take a look at if you're considering upgrading your setup getting a better panel or expanding you know your panels on your desk just do me a favor if you're gonna get more than one panel make sure they're matched please that's a personal thing of mine don't send me pictures if you're like i've got three different panels on my desk once again a huge thank you to viewsonic for sending us this panel to take a look at we were kind of discussing where this panel sort of uh would be really strong and it's obviously for anyone that doesn't want to run larger than the 24 inch panel i personally like 27s or larger but if you're doing like you know if you're having little lamb parties or you've got a small setup you can see we've got it paired with a small form factor vertical tower right here you would not need a lot of desk space here to have a a pretty awesome setup with a panel that's not going to be terrible to look at because you can have the best hardware in the world and if your panel sucks your panel is going to make your best hardware seem like crap hardware i think this one is is definitely a winner we've always been a fan of the vsonic panels we've been advertising the elite series now for over a year we still use it as our test panel you've seen it all the time as we throw it up here on the desk when we're testing various things i use it when we're doing the xlc overclocking in fact when we had a small lan party here not that long ago i think there was a small argument taking place over who gets to use it so anyway this is just like the little brother to that guy and i think you guys deserve checking out the link in the description below to see what a panel under 200 bucks can actually give you now as we move forward and panel tech becoming cheaper and more widely available so thanks for watching this video guys what is your go-to inexpensive panel your budget-friendly panel obviously the xg2405 is one that you guys uh should take a look at but if you've got another recommendation put down the comments below what you think it is and maybe we'll take a look at it thanks for watching guys we'll see in the next one [Music]

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 899,051

Keywords: Viewsonic, Xg2405, Ips, Gaming monitor, Best gaming monitor, Best cheap gaming monitor, Inexpensive gaming monitor, 144hz monitor, 1445 gaming monitor, Best monitor for gaming

Id: JRdj2amGiX8

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020