Acer XB270HA 27", 1080p, g-sync, 144Hz

What a robbery for how the cost is only for G-sync, like $200 probably only for G-sync when it probably costs like $50 or something for the hardware + licensing cost for the manufacturer.
 
RPGWiZaRD said:
What a robbery for how the cost is only for G-sync, like $200 probably only for G-sync when it probably costs like $50 or something for the hardware + licensing cost for the manufacturer.
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The monitor industry was just waiting for a feature to crank up the price and now they got it.

I won't even search for one of these G-sync monitors for 2 years when things settle down and the tech matures.
 
Ordered one off newegg, mine should be here tomorrow. I consider myself picky about screens, and I'm coming from an IPS (Dell 2209WA), so I'll post a mini-review after I check it out a bit. Most people (on newegg, blurbusters, etc.) seem to like it so that's a positive sign.
 
I'll be waiting for that review :)

I'm more interested in this than Swift as 1080p is going to be much easier to reach 120 fps for ULB modes :)
 
I just can't see this monitor being worth it over say an HP 27xi, just can't see the price difference being worth it. Realize it's G-sync, though I was able to get my 27xi for $189, less than half of what this unit is costing. That said, maybe for enthusiasts who are pushing 144fps in most games.
 
philstat said:
I just can't see this monitor being worth it over say an HP 27xi, just can't see the price difference being worth it. Realize it's G-sync, though I was able to get my 27xi for $189, less than half of what this unit is costing. That said, maybe for enthusiasts who are pushing 144fps in most games.
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Right, this is a G-sync 144hz monitor. For G-sync, currently we only have the Asus Swift and this Acer to choose from, with a couple more coming soon like the Philips and Acer 4k 60hz. This is why there is a price premium right now. It's a brand new technology so as always, there is the "bleeding edge" price to pay.

If you game extensively (especially FPS games, or anything with a lot of fast action & motion) it's the way to go.
 
Colonel Sanders said:
Right, this is a G-sync 144hz monitor. For G-sync, currently we only have the Asus Swift and this Acer to choose from, with a couple more coming soon like the Philips and Acer 4k 60hz. This is why there is a price premium right now. It's a brand new technology so as always, there is the "bleeding edge" price to pay.

If you game extensively (especially FPS games, or anything with a lot of fast action & motion) it's the way to go.
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This monitor is bad-ass for gaming, but it's still a 6-bit + dithering panel. It's instantly noticeable to me coming from my Korean 1440p IPS. Dithering always shows itself and it's impossible to hide. If color and image quality are paramount to you, I don't know if you'll be satisfied. I'm willing to deal with it for the simple fact that gaming on it is an amazingly smooth experience, but I still miss my 8-bit 1440p panel. I just ordered a XB280HK to run side-by-side with the 270, mostly because I want higher resolution. I will be able to make the ultimate comparison at that point. Ultimately I will keep them both and use each as appropriate since it's apparently impossible to make a monitor with all the traits that I want.

The Asus ROG Swift wasn't an option for me because monitors with visual defects drive me insane. Swift has too many uniformity issues to convince me its a smart buy for my tastes.
 
Not that this would change what you think of the Swift's display, but it is in fact an 8bit TN panel. I thought the Acer was supposed to be 8bit as well, but I don't know how concrete that is. The previous Acer gaming monitor was said to have 8bit and some thought that the XB270H probably used the same panel.
 
I'm really thinking of getting this one, ROG SWIFT is too pricey (well, too pricey for a TN panel with less than stellar quality control) and would require me to replace my GPU too.

That plus there are a lot of defects on it and I'd like to have 1080p on 24" or 27" because it's much easier on the eyes when reading etc (and my eyes kind of suck although I'm still very picky when it comes to monitors). However I have returned more than one TN panel already because of dithering/banding so I'm really concerned... I thought this was a real 8bit panel? :(

It's funny though because the 6bit+FRC IPS panel (well, according to the spec sheets I can find online at least) I'm using right now has absolutely no visible dithering/banding to my eyes so I'm not entirely sure the bit depth matters all that much...
 
389.99 Pound Sterlings equals


629.43 US Dollars


No Thanks =) I would pay half that maybe =)
 
Well, if it really is a 8bit panel with decent contrast etc it might be worth the price (we all know how much g-sync adds to the bill..). But there are no professional reviews up and no one with a colorimeter seems to have bought it so there are still a lot of things we don't know about this monitor :(

I'll possibly try it myself in a couple of months (and just return it if I don't like it). And I should have a colorimeter available too.
 
I have one of these coming today as well as a Swift. I will definitely post up a comparison and thoughts on each, for those interested.
 
Colonel Sanders said:
I have one of these coming today as well as a Swift. I will definitely post up a comparison and thoughts on each, for those interested.
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COOL :p

I got a the November Maximum PC in the mail they didn't really give the swift a total knock me over rating it got 8 out of 10 they said the image quality wasn't the best but it's AU optronics.
 
I picked up one of these about a month ago from newegg business for about $550. Coming from 3x HP ZR24 IPS in eyefinity and I have been impressed and I am totally satisfied with the Acer.

Mine has no dead pixels, backlight bleed or clouding. The picture is great and there is none of the inversion issues that the swift has. Coming from 60hz 144hz is crazy smooth, gsync just works in every game with not one issue yet. ULMB is dark but with the lights off it's fine.

I was worried about the PPI being a 27" @ 1080p and coming from 24" 1200p but it looks great, I can't see any pixels, the picture is great. Sitting next to an IPS though you can really see the colors aren't great but for gaming it's fine. I went with this over the swift because I wanted to hit high frames without the headaches of SLI. I have this with a 980 and in most games at 1080p I can hit at least 80fps but I'm usually in the 110+ fps range. Overall very happy with this monitor.
 
Alright, so comparison time between the Asus Swift and the Acer. First, the stand of the Acer is every bit as good as the Swift. The footprint is a bit smaller, so maybe not QUITE as stable, but of course it's also.. a smaller footprint.

For my eyeball comparison test, they are neck and neck in terms of color vibrancy, contrast, black levels. The OSD on the Acer is not quite as slick as the Asus (especially with the lovely little joystick on the back of the Swift) but still functional. It has a gamma adjustment that I don't see on the Swift. One annoying thing - the Acer has a splash screen when you turn it on, and it lasts like 5 seconds. The Swift is instant on/off. I like that better on the Swift.

The AG coating on the Acer is much less noticeable than the Swift's - that's a good thing. Any graininess from AG on the Acer was largely undetectable, unlike the Swift where it's blatant. So huge plus for Acer on the AG front.

OK, so for the most part, they're very similar except the 1080p on the Acer and 1440 on the Swift. Big difference in desktop usage with 1440. I've been used to 1080p for quite some time now, and already I've gotten used to it. Testing the Acer immediately felt a bit clunky, going back down to 1080p. Still, it didn't bother me that much, and since we're talking about gaming monitors anyway, 1080p is much easier to drive at high FPS if you don't have a GPU powerhouse. That being said, my single 780 Ti does amazingly well driving 2560x1440. Alien Isolation, Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor, etc run 100+fps at max settings, minus some AA.

OK, now which did I choose? The Swift. Here's why. The Acer looks fine on desktop, but I noticed a subtle horizontal banding/lines (similar to what I've seen pics of the Swift's "vertical line" phenomenon.) It's very hard to notice, and if you sit fairly far from the display you might never notice, but I did, almost right away. I doubt it's anything wrong with this particular monitor, but I guess it's possible. I tried to take a pic with my Iphone but I couldn't get it to show up well enough.

Overall the Acer is a nice monitor. 2560x1440 just turned out to be a big plus for me, for the Swift.
 
So I got mine about 7 hours ago. To get right to the point, I'm highly impressed. As I said, I'm coming from an IPS (Dell 2209WA). Once I set the color temp to standard instead of warm, this monitor looks almost as good. Some colors are a little less vibrant, but it's hardly noticeable. Basically I'd rate the colors as about 90% as good as the Dell. But the kicker is of course the refresh rate and g-sync, more than make up for the less vibrant colors. It was basically plug and play, I did uninstall the gpu drivers, plug in the monitor and re-install the drivers per instructions I saw on the web to avoid certain issues, but after that it was a breeze. Just had to set the refresh rate in the nvidia control panel to 144hz.

Skyrim was night and day, for skyrim you can play with v-sync on, or a frame rate limiter, as if you uncap the frame rate you get strange effects and sounds and really bad tearing. In my experience frame rate limiting skyrim before g-sync caused bad stuttering. But when I ran it with g-sync and set a frame rate limit in enbseries since I was using that for memory management anyway, I never imagined skyrim would be so responsive as what I saw. I realize now what a huge distraction v-sync lag and tearing are now that I don't have them, and am really glad I spent the money for the acer.

Also played BF4. Unfortunately, I managed to play 4 hours of BF4 before I realized I forgot to change the BF4 display settings from 1680x1050x60hz. doh! It was still smooth and tear free, but not that much of an improvement, once I set it to 1920x1080x144 though, it was so much better; smooth, tear free and fast as hell. A very immersive experience over my old 60hz Dell.

Text looks great at 27in 1080p, it's all smooth, with good looking curves. I notice no aliasing unless I put my head one foot from the screen and stare at a particular letter, and then only barely. this dithering test, http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php - is perfectly smooth on this panel, no banding of any kind. I don't know if that means it's 8-bit, but that and the gamma test at the same site looked real good (afaict I'm not a monitor expert by any means.)

Moving windows, or the cursor around, is mesmerizing at 144hz, it's almost odd how smooth it is. This is really the first g-sync monitor that had the specs I wanted (27in @ 1080p - because I wanted a large screen and don't want to go SLI to get good FPS; what's the good of 144hz if you are pushing 40 after all?) so I can't say I should've gone g-sync sooner, but I am really glad I did now. I was worried that a TN panel wouldn't cut it, but it looks as I said 90% or better as good as my old Dell, in pictures, flesh looks like flesh and everything looks like I'd expect, and all that, so I'm completely satisfied. Really the only color issue I notice is with greys, they look a little washed out. But I get bright reds, deep oceanic blues, and popping orange. Black is not black as night or anything, but you definitely wouldn't think "that's not black". And to be honest, the issue with the greys could be that my last panel was old and brightness was fading, so far all I know they look better on the acer, I don't really have another good monitor to test against.

Only thing that kind of bothers me is moving my head vertically, like say to lean back in my chair, causes slight color shifting. TN viewing angles issues obviously, which I did expect. It's not something I can't get used to, but it'd be so nice if they improved TNs one day to not have that issue.

That concludes my mini-review. btw, has anyone got CRU working on this? When I set a 1920x1080x144 mode using automatic LCD settings, and set it as the default, and reboot, I get no signal and I have to run the reset settings utility that comes with CRU to undo it.

(Also; no dead pixels, or any other screen issues. And didn't like ULMB - makes the screen pretty dark, which makes things look kind of blurry to me, regular 144hz and g-sync are much better imo. )
 
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Same as swift then- I guess that means they don't depend on display itself but instead are enforced by module.
 
So, how is this monitor doing? I'm close to pulling the trigger on this one and am curious. I have a Dell U2711 powered by a single GTX 780 TI SC.
 
dragon69 said:
So, how is this monitor doing? I'm close to pulling the trigger on this one and am curious. I have a Dell U2711 powered by a single GTX 780 TI SC.
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Mine's doing great, completely happy with it. G-sync works as advertised, so does 144hz.
 
dragon69 said:
So, how is this monitor doing? I'm close to pulling the trigger on this one and am curious. I have a Dell U2711 powered by a single GTX 780 TI SC.
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It's working great here. It's the monitor to get if you want bigger than a 24" with high frames and a single Nvidia graphics card. One thing to note like Colonel Sanders said sitting close to it there is faint horizontal banding, though I sit about 3ft away and don't notice it from that distance.
 
blizzle said:
It's working great here. It's the monitor to get if you want bigger than a 24" with high frames and a single Nvidia graphics card. One thing to note like Colonel Sanders said sitting close to it there is faint horizontal banding, though I sit about 3ft away and don't notice it from that distance.
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Hum, how bad is it really? I am getting my pay soon and thought I'd pull the trigger but I'm going to be pretty close (of course I can adjust my setup but I'd say I'll often be ~ 2 feet from it).

I do want big letters without having to deal with DPI settings and I am certain my eyes will appreciate 1080p on 27" more than 1080p on 22". I'm mostly playing in a dark room so the ULMB should still work great for me (although that does mean I'll have to change the brightness setting every time I launch Quake/Unreal/Jedi Academy etc. since most of the time I'll be running with a very low brightness setting)
 
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kalston said:
Hum, how bad is it really? I am getting my pay soon and thought I'd pull the trigger but I'm going to be pretty close (of course I can adjust my setup but I'd say I'll often be ~ 2 feet from it).

I do want big letters without having to deal with DPI settings and I am certain my eyes will appreciate 1080p on 27" more than 1080p on 22". I'm mostly playing in a dark room so the ULMB should still work great for me (although that does mean I'll have to change the brightness setting every time I launch Quake/Unreal/Jedi Academy etc. since most of the time I'll be running with a very low brightness setting)
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It's the same thing I was talking about with the dithering if you go back further into the thread. It's nothing to worry about. I notice it occasionally when gaming but it's not something that would make me want to return the monitor. This monitor has too many good points to make it into an issue.

I don't use ULMB, but when I was playing around with it, I'm almost certain when you turn it on and off that it automatically changes your brightness setting for you. Maybe someone else in the thread can answer that since I'm at work right now and can't check.
 
Thanks for all the replies. UPS just delivered mine today and so far I absolutely love it!
 
Getting ready to pull the trigger on this one. Hoping it backs off the $599 price though.
 
Somehow I snagged a refurb of this monitor on eBay for $350 directly from Acer. Almost seems too good too be true but from everything I've seen and verified it's legit. Last one they had and the other's sold for $499 so that was odd. Can't wait to get it to go with my 970! Feels good to actually have gotten a deal for a change after missing so many over the weekend with the dreaded "out of stock" or "this coupon is not valid". Anyway, anyone looking for a gsync monitor and not wanting to way over pay keep an eye on Acer's ebay store.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261660048351?_trksid=p2060778.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT
 
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Sanitarium said:
Somehow I snagged a refurb of this monitor on eBay for $350 directly from Acer. Almost seems too good too be true but from everything I've seen and verified it's legit. Last one they had and the other's sold for $499 so that was odd. Can't wait to get it to go with my 970! Feels good to actually have gotten a deal for a change after missing so many over the weekend with the dreaded "out of stock" or "this coupon is not valid". Anyway, anyone looking for a gsync monitor and not wanting to way over pay keep an eye on Acer's ebay store.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261660048351?_trksid=p2060778.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT
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Assuming there's nothing wrong with it, and there probably isn't, you just got quite a deal. It's an awesome gaming monitor.
 
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Just an update for anyone interested in this monitor. I got my refurb unit on Monday and it's mint. It had some residue from the plastic film on the bezel from when it was new but it cleaned off easily enough. The screen is perfect. No dead pixels, no light bleed or anything of the sort. Also, I just noticed Acer is now selling refurbs on Amazon for the same price, $349.99. Great deal here, but of course your mileage may vary. All I know is I'm never going back to anything without G-Sync or Freesync, it makes an amazing difference. If you don't have it, your monitor is your bottleneck, seriously.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...olp_refurbished?ie=UTF8&condition=refurbished
 
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Sanitarium said:
Just an update for anyone interested in this monitor. I got my refurb unit on Monday and it's mint. It had some residue from the plastic film on the bezel from when it was new but it cleaned off easily enough. The screen is perfect. No dead pixels, no light bleed or anything of the sort. Also, I just noticed Acer is now selling refurbs on Amazon for the same price, $349.99. Great deal here, but of course your mileage may vary. All I know is I'm never going back to anything without G-Sync or Freesync, it makes an amazing difference. If you don't have it, your monitor is your bottleneck, seriously.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...olp_refurbished?ie=UTF8&condition=refurbished
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Poof! Gone!
 
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Realize this thread is old.... so apologies for that I suppose. I figured I'd keep this centralized vs starting another thread.

I am just curious to see if your monitors have more than just a DisplayPort connector? Mine only has that, but I found a review online (trustedreviews website) that shows this with DP, HDMI, DVI, and VGA. PLUS speakers. The review says it's an XB270H just like mine, not an HU or some other variant. Does anyone else have this setup? Are you able to get the monitor to work on a non G-Sync capable card with some of the other inputs? I can't seem to get mine to work on a non G-Sync capable card... like my work laptop. Work around for this is to RDC into my work laptop... so not a huge deal. Just curious.
 
Another necro post has somebody measured the input lag. I can only find trusted reviews showing some measurements.
 
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