The CHEAPEST 144Hz Gaming Monitors on Amazon!

you guys already know all about the cheapest 4k monitor that we unboxed and checked out a little while back but the problem with that video is that the cheapest 4k monitor is probably not something that most people want because if you have want the cheapest of anything you're probably hooking it up to an entry-level system in which case you're gonna struggle to run the latest games at 4k at decent frame rates anyway so today's video is about what you guys really want the cheapest high refresh rate 1080p monitor and for good measure we grabbed the second cheapest and also the third cheapest and we're gonna see which one makes the most sense for your gaming experience speaking of experiences our segways are one hell of an experience the C Sonic prime ultra titanium power supply is an ultra high efficiency 80 plus titanium power supply it's kind of in the name that's backed by a 12 year warranty check it out at the link in the video description [Music] let's start with the scepter c24 this one is gonna cost you just a hundred and fifty five ninety-nine on Amazon which is just freakin outstanding like I remember wasn't that long ago that to experience high refresh rate gaming you were spending hundreds of dollars not just like a hundred and fifty bucks so it's 24 inches it runs at a 144 Hertz refresh rate it features a VA panel I mean that alone is mind-blowing for you know a hundred and fifty dollar monitor again not going that far back in time and it also features AMD freesync which means that we may actually be able to manually enable g-sync even although if it's not on the G sync compatible validated list the experience might not be that great grow that bad boy in there and use the included screwdriver to assemble it even like five thousand dollar TVs don't necessarily come up with the screwdriver you need to assembly it's a nice touch wait what are you judging me by my screwdriver size it's perfectly fine alright that's better not much in terms of adjustment but my expectations again are pretty low for a budget monitor at least the stand is made of metal but one thing that doesn't feel particularly budget is check this out like again not that long ago getting hdmi 2.0 and DisplayPort both of which support the monitors full resolution and refresh rate was not necessarily a given and we've got a second HDMI that one's just HDMI 1.4 if you wanted to hook up something like you know a game console in addition to your PC now this is when you don't see very often to save room inside the monitor and simplify the design they haven't gone with an internal power supply that's perfectly normal but the thing that's not normal is for it to be just like what are these super basic wall warts I mean this is only like a 30 watt wall worth 12 volts three amps nice they included a DisplayPort cable very nice it actually doesn't feel like a complete piece of garbage either as freakin awesome so one thing of note is that the monitor is not actually very curved I was a little bit worried because 24 inches is pretty small like it does not require a curved display in order to get any kind of benefit out of it but this is so subtly curved that it's pretty much not noticeable so one thing that's noticeable immediately is that in spite of the fact that it's using a VA panel you can see our whites are quite the quite gray they're quite dirty you know just doing like a quick and dirty you know fire up an explorer window and drag it around okay no that's a fair bit of smearing I was saying from moving the cursor around it looked pretty good but this is this is not this is not a tremendous result here there's one button for menu or back and confirm and then there's another button that's a rocker for up and down so I found a couple of interesting things in here there's no option to enable overclocking or anything like that but curiously the Nvidia control panel magically healed itself there's are 144 Hertz also I found the overdrive setting which to be clear is not the same as refresh rate overclocking that affects how your pixels switch and actually with it enabled I'm not getting too many additional artifacts and that smearing it might look a little better so we're gonna leave overdrive on for the rest of our testing all right let's see how this feels actually not bad not bad at all that low contrast II look ain't great you know it's not like this is the world's most visually fulfilling gaming experience or anything like that but it is very very usable if we've got a really high contrast border here and it's it's smeary but it's not artefact II which personally I find a lot more bothersome than a little bit of smearing for our final trick I want to see if we can get more than 144 Hertz out of this thing so we are running at a hundred and sixty five Hertz now now I've talked about this before to me that's not a an immensely all difference in smoothness compared to 144 or even 120 but hey hurts this hurts I'll take it all right well why don't we push further than I mean should we try 240 now I'm hoping that if we're way beyond the capabilities of the monitor I will be able to see if it's skipping frames but there's nothing obvious now I should be able to tell the difference between 240 Hertz and 144 ish no I'm definitely seeing some yep no this is not working correctly so as I'm panning there's just occasional small stutters or hiccups that I can more feel than see like it's not something I'm gonna be able to show you guys on camera it does feel pretty darn smooth and what I can tell you guys is that if it even mostly out that looked like a skip there if it even mostly runs at 240 Hertz then 165 180 200 probably no problem the thing to watch out for with this monitor though is that in spite of its very high refresh rate you can see how this text is blurry when I'm moving my cut around its actual pixel response times are not great so it's not like you're getting the the full high refresh rate you know premium gaming monitor experience but for the price dang so I was kind of hoping that the Septor wouldn't be so great because that is a pretty high bar for the new sync 24 DP to match here let's go ahead and crack this puppy open and see what the experience is like so just like the sceptre this one runs out a hundred and forty-four Hertz it's got AMD freesync it's a 1080p panel but unlike the sceptre it includes an HDMI rather than a display port cable and it uses a TN rather than a VA panel with that said at this price point and give us that what we're targeting here is high refresh rate gaming rather than say content creation that TN panel assuming that it's not a horrific one may end up being an advantage since our biggest complaint with the scepter was that very significant pixel response time induced motion blur instead of like a an attached sort of v-shaped metal stand for the base you just get this very inexpensive piece of extruded aluminum with these screws pre mounted in it and then a simple plastic UFO frisbee debase excuse me disc disc sorry this is truly a very cheap mounting mechanism now one nice thing about the new sink I guess is that it has a larger power brick 12 volt 5 amps but it doesn't weigh much more than the other ones so I'm not sure how believable any of that is also I don't actually see like are you supposed to have a seee logo on this thing for sale in North America or ul or like anything I recognize mm-hmm so instead of just sourcing multiple different power cords they just use all Korean ones and then ship one of these super cheap flimsy adapters with it for the region that you're in now I could just plug in the HDMI cable that was included in the box it seems decent enough but for an apples-to-apples comparison if we want to overclock we're gonna need DisplayPort anyway so I'm gonna go ahead and plug that in and we can use this opportunity actually to take a look at the i/o so unlike the sceptre it only has a single display port and a single HDMI and it doesn't actually specify what type it is here but we can figure that out quickly enough this is curious there's enough room in the chassis to have an internal power supply you can see they've actually got like a punch out here for an AC plug but they went with an external power supply again probably to save cost curiously yeah you can really tell that it's got a very different interpretation of what colors should look like and I think we're gonna restart the game just to see what's going on with this weird kind of shudder that we're experiencing so let's go ahead and do that it feels like to compensate for the TN miss they've like cranked the saturation a little bit but with that said at least on the desktop or just browsing websites it honestly looks pretty convincing like it's not it's not bad you can only really tell that it's T antastic when you get to a more extreme viewing angle like that see that from straight on older TN panels in particular you'd really see things like this grey on grey for these icons here would completely disappear if you looked at them from an extreme top-down angle like this I think it's fair to say that this is pretty darn good for a cheap TN panel we've come a long long way what is that it's not the monitor or is that my window no control of overdrive or anything like that pretty much the only thing we can really adjust is turning freesync on or off so our 144 Hertz option shows up out of the box this - oh boy uh-oh wha wha well that is a real shame because aside from this obvious problem running at 144 Hertz let alone 240 I would say that our motion blur is significantly better like this text is much more readable why don't we try 120 and see what happens no interesting why don't we switch over to HDMI all right so now we're using DisplayPort to HDMI adapter actually let's use the Nvidia control panel cuz I want to see if we're getting those weird lines and it doesn't look like we are now we're limited to 120 Hertz so that would be H - oh shoot it did it again okay no I'm done with this forget it I mean at this point we had to lean on scepter for the screw driver for the DisplayPort cable we can't lean on scepter 2 also provide like the monitor and then still consider it a valuation of the whatever this thing is new think you're down you're out that brings us to our last monitor one that is actually marked down $20 right now to 160 you know you could use that extra 20 bucks to buy a water bottle lgt store common anyway this one is from LG it's their LG Ultra gear 24 gl 600's and is the only one from like a what I would consider to be a pure one recognized brand name also of note is that even at this price point Ultra gear is actually a new lineup from LG we've looked at some of their higher end stuff they didn't send this we bought this but we are expecting this to be like an all-new model completely new chassis electronics and all that kind of stuff I actually have really high hopes for this one mind you at this point I feel like I'll settle for a ul logo on the power adapter paradis good job LG once again sceptre stands out with their included screwdriver you're gonna use that to assemble the LG monitor as well getting my money's worth out of this thing but in fairness to LG while their arm here is actually made of plastic the base is significantly more robust than either of the other monitors we've looked at and if you care at all about the style of your display and you're trying to have like a nice looking desk set up I think a lot of people will appreciate the little sort of splash of red accent that they've got going on I mean quality and the plastic is good actually with that said there's a lot of wobble in this that's like five seconds of wobble if you hit it pretty hard io wise things are looking pretty good here we've got DisplayPort dual HDMI headphone out DC in it pretty much what we'd expect I have pretty high hopes for this one even if it only includes an HDMI cable I do understand why some monitor manufacturers if they're just gonna include one cable do opt for HDMI because from a compatibility standpoint they don't know that this isn't for a dorm room where someone's hooking up their Xbox or whatever so let's plug in our sceptre DisplayPort cable oh it's got nipple control I like it so an exciting thing about encountering a name brand monitor at this price point is that we can expect kind of a sensible well laid out fully featured OSD and that's exactly what we get so you've got all your sort of gaming profiles which generally I don't think people are really used but whatever you've got the ability to set both basic and extended precinct ranges black stabilizer if you're into that you can change your response times fast is generally the one that I recommend that is the default don't turn these crosshairs on you're basically a bad person user in-game crosshairs but then all the other things that you'd expect to be able to adjust so your color temperature profile and all that kind of good stuff also one thing that's nice about the nipple is it's really easy to navigate without looking at it if you want to switch inputs it's super intuitive unlike the last ten we looked at which disappointingly had other flaws that just made it not a feasible option this one does not stand out as having particularly vibrant color or exceptional contrast viewing angles though like the other one are decent enough this is a modern TN as opposed to an older absolutely fantastic one you know that is a really weird kind of motion blur we're looking at here so it doesn't have a long trail like the VA panel of our sceptre but the text is not readable at all it's kind of like like they're over driving it really hard so it ends up not looking clear but you don't see a long trail on anything minimize one millisecond motion blur reduction time and hold on just a gosh-darn minute here now it's doing back light strobing and that is awful like it's not smeary but you end up with sort of these discreet trailing images because of the backlight strobing that's not something I would recommend turning on on this thing at all while we're at it I'm actually going to change the response times down to normal and see if we get less of that artifacting No you can still see here so this is an overdrive artifact where our exes are actually turning green as we move this window around let's turn it off now we're definitely getting smearing now in fairness to LG while those overdrive artifacts were really undesirable on the Windows desktop this is the most readable that we've seen this text while moving the camera around and I think it's fair to say that our color profile is better than the sceptre with better native contrast it is noticeably better in game even if there are things I really don't like about it from the desktop yep so that's interesting we set 165 the monitor I don't know maybe could do it but and maybe this is the other edge of the double-edged sword of LG's more sophisticated firmware they are basically putting an error message on the screen that says no you actually may not do that also the stand really isn't very good so conclusion time then this was really surprising to me on paper I was not expecting to like the sceptre VA panels aren't known for their amazing response times and we did get some ghosting but it has other redeeming qualities that I felt really made up for it it's got great inputs given the price point it was massively overclockable even though we might have gotten a peach here but it'd be clear we just bought it off Amazon so you could just as easily get one as us and while the curve is not something that I desired what I found was that it's so subtle that it just wasn't noticeable at all with that said for a mere five dollars more if I'm not interested in overclocking my monitor and I want something that's a bit more of a polished experience LG's ultra gear also really stands out with that said we don't know if this promo is gonna last forever and at a twenty five dollar difference to me if you're going for a budget high refresh rate monitor the sceptre easily wins our pick speaking of things that win our pick this segue to our sponsor Volta magnetic cables the Volta magnetic adapter 2.0 allows you to add Volta snag free feature to any cable its comp hacked it's got a reversible magnetic tip it's cross-device compatible so you can use a single cable and go from charging your iPad pro to your iPhone and the blue LED shows that the cable is plugged in and powered it supports one pluses - charge while we supercharged and fast charging and we've got a 30-day money-back guarantee so if you're not happy you can send the item back and get a full refund so thanks for watching guys hope you enjoyed this video if you did maybe check out our other review of LG's high-end ultra your monitor we'll have that link below and I will see you next time

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 5,181,291

Rating: 4.9377003 out of 5

Keywords: 4k, 144hz, high refresh rate, gaming monitor, gaming, display, hdr, 1ms, ips, tn, lg, sceptre, wish, amazon

Id: 76KPzzMccjM

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/DerpFarce]

Reading the title of your post I legit thought Linus dropped the monitor.