Got my ASUS VG236H, What Should I Adjust?

BusyBeaverHP

Limp Gawd
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Jun 22, 2009
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I got my ASUS VG236H, I bought it purely for 120hz gaming. I will have it hooked up with Dual-Link DVI to Radeon 4890's in CF later tonight.

As a first time owner of this monitor, what settings should I adjust to make sure everything is running at 120hz (when possible)?

What about color adjustment? According to This Review, this monitor has a slight green tinge out of the box.

VG236H owners: What have you done with your VG236H? I'd like some ideas so I can best optimize my new monitor, hardware and software-wise. Thanks ahead of time!
 
There's not much you have to do to ensure you get 120Hz. Just set the refresh rate to 120 in your control panel and make sure v-sync is turned off for your games. Some games allow you to set the target frame rate for v-sync, so you can always set it to 120 if it's available.

In terms of adjusting the colors, I honestly don't have any great advice. I've used a Spyder3 Pro to calibrate the ASUS and I'm still not fully happy with the colors, contrast, or gamma. By default, does your ASUS seem to totally wash out lighter tones? (I'm curious if mine is defective).

CNET recommends the following:
"During general use, watching movies, and playing games, we found the VG236H's Standard Mode preset to be the optimal picture setting with the color temperature set to User and the Red to 94 and green to 85."

Best of luck!
 
So after a week of checking out review sites, other forums, and messing around with my own monitor. I noticed several things about my VG236H out of the factory:

- The default 100 brightness setting is blindingly bright. I can barely look at it without squinting.
- The default R100 G100 B100 has a blue tint and is very noticeable, especially when I compare it to my HP 2159m.
- The brighter tones were richer on my HP 2159m. Though both monitors looked very good.

I've experimented with other people's settings in their reviews before, and tweaked it to be my own. My settings currently:

Viewing Mode: Standard
Brightness: 28
Contrast: 80
Trace-Free: 60
R100 G100 B85

asusvg236handhp2159m.jpg

Notice the difference in the sun's corona in the wallpaper, the 2159m does a better job with brighter tones.

To power 120hz, I will have to upgrade my graphics card soon, after the flagship GPU prices stabilize... oh yeah, Ivy Bridge incoming!
 
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After playing around with the adjustment some more, I found the culprit for the brighter-tone washout: it's the high default contrast.

With trying the different modes, I also found that Standard Mode didn't provide enough of the color gamut that the VG236H was capable of, and strangely, the saturation option was disabled on Standard. Many of the other modes provided, like Scene, Theater, and Game had good saturation, but too much.

Theather and Scene Mode blacken out the darker tones completely, so that's off my list.

Game Mode was pretty raw in its default settings and was poorly calibrated out of the box. I went in there and made adjustments that befitted my eyes. Notes:

Game Mode
The good: displays much more of the color gamut than compared Standard Mode
The bad: terrible calibration out of the box

Brightness: 40
In Standard Mode, I had the brightness adjusted lower, but lowering the contrast generally lowers the gamma as well, so brightness had to be turned up to compensate.

Contrast: 55
(important, this is what is causing the brighter-tone washout problem)
With a value of 80 before, the default contrast washes out the near-white tones and holding back the color potential of this monitor. Lowering it yield noticeable results distinguishing tones near bright lights.

ASCR: Disabled
Trace Free: 60

Sharpness: 25
Too much sharpness causes artifacting of images, the default at 31 is *almost* perfect, but I prefer my images slightly softer.

Saturation: 40
What Standard Mode lacked. I can tell because I have an HP 2159m as a second monitor that tells me the VG236H's Standard Mode can't fully saturate the things that are fully saturated on my 2159m.

R100 G100 B85
Once again, ASUS out of the box has a very noticeable blue tint, and this has been confirmed by several various reviews. Knock the blue down a bit solves the issue.

Skin Tone: Natural

After this adjustment, the ASUS VG236H has matched my HP 2159m's image quality. Since I was always 100% satisfied with my HP 2159m image quality, this ASUS monitor is now perfect... I think, maybe... I'll let my eyes adjust to it and see what happens.
 
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Before: (Standard Mode)
asusvg236handhp2159m.jpg


After: (Gaming Mode calibrated)
asusvg236handhp2159mv2.jpg


Notice the reduced washout afterwards.
 
Is this still the correct way to calibrate this monitor do everything in game mode like above for saturation
 
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