I tested the cheapest gaming monitors (and found a gem)

have you seen these insanely cheap gaming monitors on Amazon and such like these almost too good to be true deals where you can get a 165 HZ gaming monitor for like a 100 bucks or so sometimes for even less these got to be bad right or at the very least not as good of a deal as they seem to be well at least one of them is actually pretty good I recently tested this monitor right here the Kura 24 E3 and this actually is an insanely good monitor for its price like if you're a bit lucky you can get it for just slightly over $100 US which is kind of a steal I mean the gaming experience you're getting on this cheap monitor really is not that far off for monitors that cost almost twice as much however it's not perfect for just over 100 bucks it's terrific but it struggles with color accuracy and the response times also could be faster and that got me thinking perhaps I can find an even better monitor in this price range so after digging through the web I got these two that seem to be the most promising candidates on one side we have the the KDC h24 t9p and I've selected this one specifically because of the experience I've had with other monitors from KDC I've tested three of them so far and all of them were great if not insane value for money so I have high hopes for this one I've seen it for as low as $90 us after a $30 coupon which is kind of hard to comprehend like that's insane for a165 HZ IPS monitor of course I've got International links for all these monitors in the video description in case you want to check the current pricing in your region or buy something now I also wanted to see what the more established Brands had to offer and my eyes fell on this monitor by MSI this is the g241 2 which is the updated version of the g241 I've reviewed the original g241 and I quite liked it so this should be a promising candidate as well also it's great to see that the updated version now is even more affordable and can compete with the low prices of Brands like kuray and KDC so let's put them side by side spec-wise they could could hardly be more similar all of them are 24 in 1080P monitors and all of them are using IPS panels now what's immediately clear when looking at them side by side is that the same image is looking quite different in all three monitors all of them are on their default settings and at their Max brightness right now and yeah the brightness difference is probably the most obvious difference between them but they also have pretty different white points with different color temperatures and color tints that's even more obvious when looking at a 100% white image the Kur on the left has the most accurate wi point and both the MSI and KDC are super far off as the high Delta e values confirm it's not that big of a deal as you can adjust the Y point on the KDC and MSI pretty easily however you can do anything about a low maximum brightness and when it comes to maximum brightness the cay just can't keep up to keep it fair these brightness numbers already compensate for the different white points and represent the maximum these monitors can achieve at the same d65 yo so the MSI g412 seems like the winner here at least when you don't mind justing the yoint yourself however watch what happens when we put these monitors on the lowest brightness setting the MSI clearly is the brightest again which in this context is not good at all if you want to use your monitor in a dark room 122 nits are just way too bright but the other two are doing a great job and won't burn your eyes out at night so yeah it's kind of hard to pick a clear winner here so let's see what happens when we level the playing field and adjust all of them to the same brightness and white point the KDC and MSI now look remarkably similar the kuray 24 E3 however does not look like the other two like in this scene on the kuray the rocks have a clear magenta tint and the blue tones in the sky and the water look totally off as well so what exactly is going on here well both the ktc and MSI don't have pinpoint accurate colors without proper calibration and profiling but they generally put colors at at the correct use meaning red hones for example look red and not orange and not magenta so we measure relatively low Delta H values that back up these observations the cay however has a much higher Delta H so the actual color use are all over the place which is the reason the colors look off next to the other monitors it's hard to decide whether the KDC or the MSI has the better image quality but it's pretty clear that the CET 24 E3 is way behind now let's focus on the ktc and MSI for a bit they're close but I slightly prefer the colors on the ktc kind of hard to pick up from the camera footage but colors pop just a bit more on the KDC than on the MSI reason for that is the larger color gam in volume of the KDC and its overall color accuracy is also slightly better the full color accuracy results of the KDC are available as a free post on my patreon by the way Link in the video description now even though I prefer the colors of the KDC sometimes the image just looks better on the MSI have a close look at these super dark scenes for example if you're watching this video on a somewhat decent display you probably going to notice that the black areas look less like a deep black and more grayish on the KDC monitor on the left than on the MSI and yeah when we measure the contrast ratio the MSI almost reaches 1,500 to1 whereas the KDC scores a below average contrast ratio of 825 to1 so it's really no surprise the dark scenes look better on the MSI this makes watching movies or a good cinematic TV show more enjoyable on the MSI but this really is something you're only going to notice in Darker scenes and without pixel peeping and a direct comparison to a higher contrast panel both the kuray and the KDC really don't look too bad either so who's the winner when it comes to image quality I'd say it's actually a tie between the KDC and MSI as both have some things going for them at the very least both are superior to the kuray so that's a partial success already but yeah the these are gaming monitors so the image quality isn't the only thing that matters I also played a lot of FPS games on all three monitors and I can comfortably say that you can definitely have fun with all of them even more competitive games like valent or CS even super cheap IPS monitors these days can be pretty fast and monitor manufacturers usually don't screw up the display lag so gaming feels very responsive on each of these monitors and the data backs that up as well each of these monitors just measures zero 0.1 milliseconds of processing lag so they're virtually lag free however I still have a favorite monitor for gaming out of these three the KZ h24 T 09p and I prefer it over the others because of its faster response times we're getting an average response time of just 5.3 milliseconds which can actually compete with the best 165 HZ monitors that's pretty insane given how affordable this monitor is the MSI is a good 2 millisecond slow on average and the kuray add another millisecond and side by side you can actually see that the ktc is a good bit faster than the other two especially the UFO in the middle track shows less ghosting if I had to rank these i' put the KDC first followed by the kuray and then the MSI visually the MSI g241 2 is the slowest of the bunch but this still isn't a bad monitor for gaming by any means the kyc is just super fast and actually way faster than you would expect an ultra budget monitor to be I have to say that I'm really impressed by these cheap gaming monitors because to show that you really don't need to spend much these days to have a great gaming experience and a good image quality on top of that however this doesn't mean that every of these super cheap gaming monitors you find online will be good there's still a lot of listings for monitors with TN panels in this price segment which I really wouldn't recommend buying for most people I'd say get one of these three make sure you get it at a good price and also plan in some money for a decent monitor arm because yeah as good as the displays are the STS on each of these monitors really are not they offer almost no adjustability and are all way too low so do you NE a favor get a nice monitor arm and you have a great monitor setup on a budget I'm going to link the individual reviews of the kuray and MSI on screen right now in case you want to know all the details and the full measurement results for the KDC including the settings recommendations and ICC profile are available as a public post on my patreon so you don't need to be a patreon to see those thanks for watching this some next video

Channel: techless

Views: 482,765

Keywords: cheap monitor, 165 hz, 144 hz

Id: xPBgtG70Ta8

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023