Startech PC Monitor

How to buy the best gaming monitor in 2017 - [Blog Post]

Gamers don’t just see video games as games. They’re a transcending experience that pits you against the greatest of challenges. Why settle for the mediocre when it comes to how you experience every new PC release or retro classic?

Whether you’re building or buying a PC, a monitor isn’t usually the first component people consider as a high priority feature. Consumers don’t take into account the various factors that paint the best picture for whatever gaming they prefer, purchasing a PC monitor without heeding second thought to whether LCD, widescreen, or 4K are the perfect fit for them (5K even goes as far as to make real life look flat and distilled.) We’ve left the bulking block monitor-age, people!

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Refresh Rates

Refresh rates is something every gamer should consider for their monitor. How fast your gaming monitor refreshes the screen per second is a crucial part of gaming, from a common side-scroller to an intense FPS dual. Measured in Hertz (Hz), you’ll find that the majority of 4K LCD monitors have a refresh rate of 60Hz, meaning the screen is refreshed 60 times per second. Try blinking that! (Authors note: I hope this article at least creates a gallery of readers trying to blink sixty times in a second.)

By today’s standards, 60Hz isn’t that advanced. If a game plays at 120 frames per second, on a 60HZ monitor you will only – you guessed it – see 60 frames a second. These 60Hz monitors experience problematic blur of fast moving images, risking the player a defeat or loss while gaming. Adaptive refresh rate technology, Nvidia’s G-Sync or AMD’s FreeSync, tackles this issue by smoothing up frames per second and slowing potential input lag. If you’re playing a fast-paced shooter like Counter-Strike, every frame per second counts for reaction time with tackling oncoming waves of enemies.

Developed gaming displays evolved from this complication. A crucial part of their popularity came from the fact they had the capability to run at 144Hz. Gamers wanted a PC monitor that could match their increasingly powerful graphic cards: if the GPU could run at 120 frames per second, they wanted a monitor that could as well. Now, it’s universally the norm to have games that run at the common 144Hz. Some monitors have even increased to 200Hz to pace with this.