The Ultimate Guide to Buying a Gaming Monitor in 2022

so you'll want to get a new monitor for your gaming pc but you feel pretty intimidated when you're shopping and you see titles like this it looks scary but it's actually really easy to understand and by the end of this video even if you are a complete noob to gaming monitors you are going to be able to shop like a pro so first let's break down all the terminology that you need to know and we're going to use this gaming monitor from gigabyte as our primary example let's first start with size this is a 27-inch monitor and you're gonna find that 27 inches is a very popular size i started gaming on a 24 inch monitor and it's crazy what a difference just three inches makes i'd recommend getting something between 24 and 32 inches with 72 inches being the sweet spot and if you're wondering what size your current monitor is just grab some measuring tape and measure from one corner of the screen to the other one thing to keep in mind is that bigger isn't always better because as the screen size increases the pixels will need to stretch unless of course you increase the number of pixels and that brings us to resolution i think it's safe to say that we're all pretty familiar with today's standard resolutions 1080p 1440p and 4k are the resolutions you'll most likely see when shopping for a gaming monitor put simply those numbers are referring to the number of pixels on your screen and the higher the number is the better picture you are going to get now you might recall seeing terms like hd fhd qhd wqhd uhd these are terms made up by marketers in an effort to simplify resolutions for the average joe to understand but in all reality it's just caused more confusion because you'll often see these terms used interchangeably for different resolutions this graph here shows the most common resolutions you will see when shopping for a gaming monitor along with the various marketing terms you can either memorize them or just ignore them and look for the exact resolution in the product description now you might be surprised to hear that i usually don't recommend a 4k monitor to pc gamers there are two big reasons for this number one is cost when you find a 4k gaming monitor at a reasonable price pay close attention to the details odds are the other areas of performance such as refresh rate and response time which we'll get into those in a minute they have been lowered in order to keep the price in the affordable range and that's fine if you're wanting a 4k monitor for things like watching movies or doing visual creative work but if you want a 4k monitor that also has good performance for gaming be prepared to shell out a lot more cash hence why i usually don't recommend 4k monitors especially when people are just getting into pc gaming reason number two is potential overkill unless you have a beefy graphics card like an rtx 3080 or 3090 running a triple a title game at 4k means you're likely going to sacrifice performance issues in other areas even today the world's most competitive esports gamers play on either 1080p or 1440p monitors personally my suggestion is to aim for a 1440p monitor no bigger than a 32 inch screen if your budget is a little bit tighter there's nothing wrong with a 1080p monitor as long as it comes with a high refresh rate just avoid monitors bigger than 27 inches for that 1080p resolution otherwise you'll likely notice a dip in image quality again those pixels getting stretched out so you just heard another term refresh rate this is one of the most important things to pay attention to when buying a gaming monitor this monitor has a 144 hertz refresh rate what does that mean that means every second the monitor is refreshing or redrawing the image that it's being given 144 times most monitors and tvs even ones a 4k resolution have a hertz refresh rate in the world of pc gaming 60 is considered very low but in the world of media which is what most people are using monitors and tvs for that's plenty because most films are shot at 24 frames per second and youtube videos tv shows they're all showing no more than 60 frames per second so there's little need for most people to have a monitor that refreshes 144 times every single second when only 60 frames are being sent through with gaming however it's all about getting a high fps or frames per second unlike movies many of today's games can output a high number of frames per second obviously depending on your pc hardware and how aggressive you have adjusted the in-game settings for your image quality so if you have a high-powered pc that's outputting a game at let's say 240 frames per second but you're playing on a 60 hertz monitor you're only going to see 60 frames per second because that's the highest it's able to refresh so what should you aim for for pc gaming you don't want to go any lower than 75 hertz and unless you have a high performance graphics card you're not going to see a lot of return for anything above 165 hertz in my opinion if you're rocking something like a 3090 graphics card and you have the budget and you really want a 240 hertz monitor then sure go for it but the sweet spot for most people to really aim for is hertz if you're someone who plays a lot of fast paced games like first person shooters i would prioritize refresh rate over resolution meaning i would take a 1080p 144 hertz monitor over a 1440p 75hz monitor because it's all about speed speaking of speed let's quick talk about response time you're often going to see numbers in these monitor titles and descriptions like five milliseconds one millisecond 0.5 millisecond that is the amount of time it takes for your monitor to react to an action you performed so when you fire the gun by clicking your mouse do you want the monitor to register that animation in five milliseconds or one milliseconds obviously the lower the number the better the monitor so when shopping for a gaming monitor the slowest that you would want is five milliseconds i would say one milliseconds is pretty common to find and honestly unless you are a super competitive gamer i wouldn't sweat too much about this number because odds are you're good you're not gonna be able to tell a difference so far we've talked about size resolution refresh rate and response time and knowing that stuff alone it's going to make a huge difference in your shopping experience but there are some other important things that you're definitely going to want to pay attention to two terms that you're going to see flying around are g-sync and free sync and without getting into the weeds g-sync was developed by nvidia and freesync was developed by amd these two technologies are meant to enhance your monitor by playing really nice with today's more modern graphics cards g-sync is regarded as the better of the two but it's not that much better and it only works with nvidia graphics cards nvidia also charges manufacturers to incorporate their technology which is why monitors that have g-sync tend to cost a little bit more the reason free is in freesync is because amd made their standard open for anybody to use hence why you see a lot more monitors that include freesync that also means that even if you have an nvidia card you can still take advantage of freesync most of the time whereas amd cards cannot take advantage of g-sync so if you have an nvidia card already and let's say you're between a monitor that is a freesync capable one or a g-sync one and everything else is equal the g-sync monitor is going to be the better option i do want to emphasize though that all gaming monitors are compatible with all cards just because you have an amd card doesn't mean that you can't buy a monitor that has g-sync compatibility or vice versa it just means that if you want to enable those extra enhancements then you will need a compatible card but you're still going to have a great monitor with or without those now there's one big mistake that you will want to avoid that i made myself when buying my first gaming monitor but before i get to that if you are wanting to avoid paying sticker price for your next gaming monitor you will definitely want to check out the tech audit tv deals website where new pc deals are posted every single day and we only post the absolute best of the best so be sure to check out that site down below in the description and you're going to want to bookmark that because nothing sucks more than overpaying for pc tech so the mistake that i made when i bought my first gaming monitor was that it wasn't mountable i wasn't really thinking at the time i kind of just assumed that any monitor could be mounted that's not the case that's not the case by simply looking at pictures of the monitor it's pretty easy to tell if you're able to attach a third-party monitor but you'll usually see something about a visa or vesa compatibility most monitors and monitor arms are compatible with each other so i wouldn't sweat about it too much there but when you are pairing the two you'll just want to check the number on your monitor odds are it's going to be a hundred by a hundred millimeters and just make sure that the amount that you already own or plan to buy supports that specific dimension which it probably will now there's a lot to say about gaming monitors that i have not covered in this video because i don't want this video to be 30 minutes long because i hate watching videos that are 30 minutes long but i just wanted to cover the core fundamentals that are most important when making a purchase decision now you might have questions about widescreen and curved monitors i feel like that warns its own dedicated video so if you haven't subscribed to the channel take care of that now so you don't miss that but my very fast answer is they're both great personally i think you're often paying a little bit more than necessary for a monitor to be curved not always but i don't think that monitors under 32 inches really need to be curved and as for wide screens i love them super fun to use they can often replace a two monitor setup but if you're planning on streaming from that monitor you often run into issues where the resolution from what you see from what your stream sees are off and you lose out on that second monitor very often you can have multiple monitors but often people replace multi-monitor setups and then you know you can't monitor your chat your twitch chat or your um your audio settings all that kind of stuff i like having two monitors at least for streaming personally but if i had to sum up what i think these sweet spot specs are to aim for in terms of just having a solid gaming monitor i would say aim for a 27-inch 1440p 144 hertz one millisecond monitor now you know what those all mean and plan on paying somewhere in that 250 300 usd range and once you do get that monitor and you're looking for a good webcam to pop on top for your twitch streams youtube streams whatever check out this video right here if you don't want to break the bank 11 webcams ranked best to worst and you might be surprised with some of these webcams

Channel: Tech Audit TV

Views: 391,183

Keywords: gaming pc, pc build, pc gaming, gaming monitor, best gaming monitor, gaming monitor 2022, how to buy gaming monitor, what is the best gaming monitor, gaming monitor buying guide

Id: VcaRpStEqVA

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 24 2021