**A Deep Dive into Gaming and Professional Monitors: What's Important to Know**

As we continue to advance in technology, it's becoming increasingly common for consumers to blur the lines between gaming and professional monitors. But is it possible to have both? In this article, we'll explore the differences between gaming and professional monitors, and what factors are truly important when making a purchasing decision.

**The 60Hz vs. 120Hz Debate**

One of the most debated topics in the world of computer monitors is the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz refresh rates. While many gamers swear by the improved performance of 120Hz monitors, others argue that it's not worth the extra cost. In our testing, we saw a noticeable improvement from 60Hz to 120Hz, but it was not a game-changer in terms of gaming performance. The real-world applications for 120Hz are limited, and most gamers will struggle to achieve high frame rates on modern PCs. However, when it comes to desktop tasks like dragging files and opening folders, the increased refresh rate is noticeable.

In contrast, the difference between 1080p and 1440p resolution is more pronounced. The larger screen size of 27 inches makes a significant impact on image quality, allowing for clearer viewing distances and more space for multiple windows and programs. However, if you're looking to play games at high frame rates, the resolution may not be as important. But for general productivity and professional use, 1440p is still the better choice.

**IPS vs. TN: What's the Difference?**

Another key factor in monitor selection is the type of panel used. IPS (In-Plane Switching) panels are known for their excellent color accuracy and wide viewing angles, making them ideal for professional work. However, they also tend to be more expensive than TN (Twisted Nematic) panels, which are often found on gaming monitors.

While IPS panels do have a higher response time (typically between 2-8 milliseconds), the difference may not be noticeable in everyday use. For most users, the benefits of an IPS panel outweigh the drawbacks of slightly slower response times. However, if you're looking for the absolute best performance in fast-paced games like Call of Duty or Overwatch, TN panels might offer a slight advantage.

**Professional Monitors: Worth the Investment?**

So is it worth investing in a professional monitor for gaming purposes? The answer is complicated. While it's technically possible to use a professional monitor for gaming, the results may not be as impressive as you expect. Color accuracy and viewing angles are critical factors in professional work, but they're less important in gaming. However, if you can find a monitor that offers the best of both worlds – excellent color accuracy and high refresh rates – it might be worth considering.

The current market offerings don't quite live up to this ideal, with most monitors sacrificing either one or the other. The Asus Rog Swift, for example, offers an IPS panel in 1440p resolution at 27 inches, but only reaches a refresh rate of 60Hz. While this is still a great monitor for professional work, it falls short of expectations for gaming.

**The Future of Monitor Technology**

As we look to the future of monitor technology, there are some exciting developments on the horizon. The Asus Rog Swift in 2014 was one of the first monitors to offer a 1440p resolution at 27 inches, and with the release of new models this year, we're starting to see more options become available. However, many of these newer models still sacrifice either color accuracy or refresh rates, limiting their value for both gaming and professional use.

The Asus Motu, set to release in March, promises to address this issue by offering an IPS panel at 1440p resolution with a 120Hz refresh rate. With a rumored price tag between $600-$900, it's unclear whether this will be within the reach of most consumers. However, for those willing to invest, this monitor could offer the perfect balance of performance and professional-grade image quality.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, while it may seem ideal to have both gaming and professional monitors, the reality is that you'll likely need to compromise on one or the other. If color accuracy and wide viewing angles are crucial for your work, a professional monitor might be the better choice. However, if you're looking for fast-paced action and smooth gameplay, a gaming monitor with excellent performance may be the way to go.

Ultimately, the key is to understand what matters most to you in a monitor and choose accordingly. With the latest developments in monitor technology, there's never been a better time to explore your options and find the perfect balance of performance and professional-grade image quality.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone my name's Tom on the tech chat today we'll be looking at two very different kinds of monitor these two could not be further apart in terms of specification one a professional display the other a gaming Focus display so we'll be looking at the questions between 1080P and 1440p at 27 in we'll be looking at TN versus IPS and finally be looking at the refresh rate of 60 HZ versus 120 HZ to see how important these things are and what they should mean to you so let's take a look at them so taking a look at these monitors a bit more closely on the left we have the Dell 2715 H and on the right we have the Asus vg278h uh on the left is an IPS on the right is a TN on the left is 1440p on the right is 1080p on the left is 60 HZ and on the right is 120 HZ um at this stage we'll set both moniters to factory default settings and 50% brightness for fair comparison you can immediately see the color difference between them you could argue that the one on the right is actually slightly more accurately white but in reality the more paper white of the IPS on the Dell is in fact more representative representative of a natural white it is in fact just I think a cooler blue tint the Asus on the right has so uh but it's quite clear the differences between them if you change uh the website if we go to BBC news for example you get a nice uh red you can see the difference between the Reds and the whites but also more immediately you can see the difference between 1080P and 144 P just how much room you extra room you have if we go back to the desktop you can see immediately on this background picture that the colors are significantly different so let's move on to how much EX extra space you get with a 1440p resolution over 1080p at the same size screen both being 27 in so on the right we start with a Chrome browser so this is on 108p at the moment and if we drag that over to the Dell which is 144 40p we'll see how much extra space we really do get with that high resolution I've been living with a 27 in 108p monitor for quite a long time now and the step up to 1440p at the same screen size is huge and you just get so much more done you can have so many more windows open uh using programs like uh Adobe uh Creative Suite and just games generally you're seeing a lot more and it's it's not just more realistic it's clearer you not actually seeing the pixels I sit about 2 or 3T from my monitors you can visibly see the pixels at 1080p uh on a screen this size so 1080p versus 1440p it really is 10 points to 1440 it makes so much difference and if you look at the Metro interface here you can see it's quite a bit smaller quite a bit clearer quite a bit nicer on the uh on the dell and so that resolution really does help out if we go to Photoshop and let's just look at this photo here this is a 1440p photo you can see that we actually have so much more space to play with and dragging it back to the Asus it feels almost claustrophobic um you're going to have to zoom out or scroll and Pan um it you know productivity for productivity reasons you're gaining a lot uh from a high resolution it's not just a nice thing to have it really does make a difference in everyday life so if we move that back again you can see and also you can see the color difference between the the accurate uh gray and the uh cooler more blue gray of the TN now tn's aren't inherently bad at colors it's more the case that their viewing angles are trous and so anything off center you you'll really suffer so straight on as we're looking now it's not too bad um versus the IPS but it is certainly not as good another program I use is Zara designer and again you can see here similar to photoshop and similar to almost all uh programs you can use that you just get so much extra space on the high resolution Mar which is really nice to have so if we move on to how this affects gaming and the gaming frame rate we'll be looking at the difference between 1440p res and 1080p res and how it affects frame rate within the game so we're starting with Armor 3 here um unfortunately Armor 3 is very difficult to get a stable frame rate in any condition you could probably have it on the lowest settings with everything off at 640 by 480 and you'd still stutter now and then it's it's not particularly well optimized but it is a game I play a lot and it looks really nice and it's something that looks a lot nicer on on the high res screen what we have seen is that although it's difficult to get a definite reading it's about 20 FPS slower on the higher res similarly in Far Cry 4 here which is actually more stable and we can actually get a much clearer look at the frame rate again we're seeing 30 on the 1440p and 50ish on the 1080p so that spec bump that bump up to 1440 is dropping you about 20 frames per second this is running on a single 780 Ti with 8 gigs of RAM and a I5 2500k um so we're seeing quite a frame rate drop uh 780ti is good and we're getting down to 30 frames per second moving on to the uh refresh rate the Dell only has 60 Herz refresh versus the 120 HZ of the Asus now in this uh Alien um test we can see that the differences between 30 and 60 are noticeable and again 60 to 20 120 is noticeable but I would I would argue it's it's less significant than the jump from 30 to 60 so although at this stage we can see that it's going from 60 to 120 is nice it's not absolutely you know Earth shatteringly different I would argue and if we look at the slowmo video here you can see that there is a difference this is at 10% speed uh but again I would argue that the difference it's a dis economy of scale essentially the 60 to 120 is not as important as the 30 to the 60 so these marketers clearly are very different and they not they're not supposed to cater to all audience is they are focused One Direction or the other the Dell professional the Asus gaming but the question is at the end does it matter can do you have to choose between one I mean can you have a gaming professional monitor for example and yes I think you can as we saw between uh when we looked at the refresh rate 60 HZ to 120 HZ is noticeable it a noticeable Improvement but it's not significant and in gaming to be pushing 120 frames is quite difficult unless you have a very powerful PC so you're not not always going to see it you might see it more on the desktop just dragging files and opening folders but it's not absolutely vital that you have it whereas 1440p especially at this size screen really does make a difference you get so much clearer you're not actually seeing the pixels from a reasonable viewing distance and you get so much more space for all your programs so in that regard I don't think the Dell is losing that much to the Asus in terms of gaming press you as I say 60 HZ really is fine and unless you have a super powerful PC uh you're not going to be getting those 120 HZ in the most recent games so that's something to consider secondly uh IPS versus TN well clearly IPS is better if for color accuracy and um viewing angles um it does have a higher resp response time between 2 and 8 millisecond response times I'm sure there is a difference but I don't personally see it um it may come up more if you just if it's Twitchy Call of Duty style games but personally I don't notice it and therefore it's really not a big deal to be going up to 8 Mega milliseconds with the Dell so this isn't you know go go for the as or go for the Dell we're looking at the more fundamental questions of 1080p versus 1440p TN versus IPS UH 60 versus 120 hertz refresh so at the end of the day I love this Dell I think it's really nice I think you don't have to necessarily uh lose out on a gaming monitor by going for something that's more professional and 120 HZ is nice but it's not the end of the world um but coming going forward in 2015 there are some monitors which Proclaim to have the best of all worlds uh the Asus uh Rog Swift in 2014 came close it had the it had a 1440p 27 in uh 144 HZ display but it was TN so it did have fairly crappy viewing angles but this year uh Asus again is doing the Rog Swift but a 4K version and an IPS but we are going back down to 60 HZ so again it's not the best of both worlds uh but ASA interestingly ASO is coming out with a Motu in March I believe which does have IPS 140 144 Herz uh at 27 in and is 1440p so that's what you want to look out for but the problem here is then great it has everything but the price and the Rumor price is going to be between 600 and 700 which is sort of 8 to $900 so that could be that is out of the reach of the vast majority of people including s something you have to weigh up but my personal opinion at the end of the day you can have a professional Monitor and play games on it you can't use a gaming monitor for professional work because colors are far too are far too in accurate you do have to compromise either way it's not a perfect world we live in but it's not too bad and it's close and uh you can do everything you want a professional one so opt for IPs opt for 1440p if you can and don't worry too much about only having 60 HZ anyway I hope this has been helpful I hope you enjoy these videos I certainly enjoy making them if you do like them please press like uh or even subscribe if you want to be kept up to date with my latest videos I try to get two or three hour a week uh in addition to a few articles and guid on my website so I hope you have a great day and it's been really nice talking to you and we'll see you soonhi everyone my name's Tom on the tech chat today we'll be looking at two very different kinds of monitor these two could not be further apart in terms of specification one a professional display the other a gaming Focus display so we'll be looking at the questions between 1080P and 1440p at 27 in we'll be looking at TN versus IPS and finally be looking at the refresh rate of 60 HZ versus 120 HZ to see how important these things are and what they should mean to you so let's take a look at them so taking a look at these monitors a bit more closely on the left we have the Dell 2715 H and on the right we have the Asus vg278h uh on the left is an IPS on the right is a TN on the left is 1440p on the right is 1080p on the left is 60 HZ and on the right is 120 HZ um at this stage we'll set both moniters to factory default settings and 50% brightness for fair comparison you can immediately see the color difference between them you could argue that the one on the right is actually slightly more accurately white but in reality the more paper white of the IPS on the Dell is in fact more representative representative of a natural white it is in fact just I think a cooler blue tint the Asus on the right has so uh but it's quite clear the differences between them if you change uh the website if we go to BBC news for example you get a nice uh red you can see the difference between the Reds and the whites but also more immediately you can see the difference between 1080P and 144 P just how much room you extra room you have if we go back to the desktop you can see immediately on this background picture that the colors are significantly different so let's move on to how much EX extra space you get with a 1440p resolution over 1080p at the same size screen both being 27 in so on the right we start with a Chrome browser so this is on 108p at the moment and if we drag that over to the Dell which is 144 40p we'll see how much extra space we really do get with that high resolution I've been living with a 27 in 108p monitor for quite a long time now and the step up to 1440p at the same screen size is huge and you just get so much more done you can have so many more windows open uh using programs like uh Adobe uh Creative Suite and just games generally you're seeing a lot more and it's it's not just more realistic it's clearer you not actually seeing the pixels I sit about 2 or 3T from my monitors you can visibly see the pixels at 1080p uh on a screen this size so 1080p versus 1440p it really is 10 points to 1440 it makes so much difference and if you look at the Metro interface here you can see it's quite a bit smaller quite a bit clearer quite a bit nicer on the uh on the dell and so that resolution really does help out if we go to Photoshop and let's just look at this photo here this is a 1440p photo you can see that we actually have so much more space to play with and dragging it back to the Asus it feels almost claustrophobic um you're going to have to zoom out or scroll and Pan um it you know productivity for productivity reasons you're gaining a lot uh from a high resolution it's not just a nice thing to have it really does make a difference in everyday life so if we move that back again you can see and also you can see the color difference between the the accurate uh gray and the uh cooler more blue gray of the TN now tn's aren't inherently bad at colors it's more the case that their viewing angles are trous and so anything off center you you'll really suffer so straight on as we're looking now it's not too bad um versus the IPS but it is certainly not as good another program I use is Zara designer and again you can see here similar to photoshop and similar to almost all uh programs you can use that you just get so much extra space on the high resolution Mar which is really nice to have so if we move on to how this affects gaming and the gaming frame rate we'll be looking at the difference between 1440p res and 1080p res and how it affects frame rate within the game so we're starting with Armor 3 here um unfortunately Armor 3 is very difficult to get a stable frame rate in any condition you could probably have it on the lowest settings with everything off at 640 by 480 and you'd still stutter now and then it's it's not particularly well optimized but it is a game I play a lot and it looks really nice and it's something that looks a lot nicer on on the high res screen what we have seen is that although it's difficult to get a definite reading it's about 20 FPS slower on the higher res similarly in Far Cry 4 here which is actually more stable and we can actually get a much clearer look at the frame rate again we're seeing 30 on the 1440p and 50ish on the 1080p so that spec bump that bump up to 1440 is dropping you about 20 frames per second this is running on a single 780 Ti with 8 gigs of RAM and a I5 2500k um so we're seeing quite a frame rate drop uh 780ti is good and we're getting down to 30 frames per second moving on to the uh refresh rate the Dell only has 60 Herz refresh versus the 120 HZ of the Asus now in this uh Alien um test we can see that the differences between 30 and 60 are noticeable and again 60 to 20 120 is noticeable but I would I would argue it's it's less significant than the jump from 30 to 60 so although at this stage we can see that it's going from 60 to 120 is nice it's not absolutely you know Earth shatteringly different I would argue and if we look at the slowmo video here you can see that there is a difference this is at 10% speed uh but again I would argue that the difference it's a dis economy of scale essentially the 60 to 120 is not as important as the 30 to the 60 so these marketers clearly are very different and they not they're not supposed to cater to all audience is they are focused One Direction or the other the Dell professional the Asus gaming but the question is at the end does it matter can do you have to choose between one I mean can you have a gaming professional monitor for example and yes I think you can as we saw between uh when we looked at the refresh rate 60 HZ to 120 HZ is noticeable it a noticeable Improvement but it's not significant and in gaming to be pushing 120 frames is quite difficult unless you have a very powerful PC so you're not not always going to see it you might see it more on the desktop just dragging files and opening folders but it's not absolutely vital that you have it whereas 1440p especially at this size screen really does make a difference you get so much clearer you're not actually seeing the pixels from a reasonable viewing distance and you get so much more space for all your programs so in that regard I don't think the Dell is losing that much to the Asus in terms of gaming press you as I say 60 HZ really is fine and unless you have a super powerful PC uh you're not going to be getting those 120 HZ in the most recent games so that's something to consider secondly uh IPS versus TN well clearly IPS is better if for color accuracy and um viewing angles um it does have a higher resp response time between 2 and 8 millisecond response times I'm sure there is a difference but I don't personally see it um it may come up more if you just if it's Twitchy Call of Duty style games but personally I don't notice it and therefore it's really not a big deal to be going up to 8 Mega milliseconds with the Dell so this isn't you know go go for the as or go for the Dell we're looking at the more fundamental questions of 1080p versus 1440p TN versus IPS UH 60 versus 120 hertz refresh so at the end of the day I love this Dell I think it's really nice I think you don't have to necessarily uh lose out on a gaming monitor by going for something that's more professional and 120 HZ is nice but it's not the end of the world um but coming going forward in 2015 there are some monitors which Proclaim to have the best of all worlds uh the Asus uh Rog Swift in 2014 came close it had the it had a 1440p 27 in uh 144 HZ display but it was TN so it did have fairly crappy viewing angles but this year uh Asus again is doing the Rog Swift but a 4K version and an IPS but we are going back down to 60 HZ so again it's not the best of both worlds uh but ASA interestingly ASO is coming out with a Motu in March I believe which does have IPS 140 144 Herz uh at 27 in and is 1440p so that's what you want to look out for but the problem here is then great it has everything but the price and the Rumor price is going to be between 600 and 700 which is sort of 8 to $900 so that could be that is out of the reach of the vast majority of people including s something you have to weigh up but my personal opinion at the end of the day you can have a professional Monitor and play games on it you can't use a gaming monitor for professional work because colors are far too are far too in accurate you do have to compromise either way it's not a perfect world we live in but it's not too bad and it's close and uh you can do everything you want a professional one so opt for IPs opt for 1440p if you can and don't worry too much about only having 60 HZ anyway I hope this has been helpful I hope you enjoy these videos I certainly enjoy making them if you do like them please press like uh or even subscribe if you want to be kept up to date with my latest videos I try to get two or three hour a week uh in addition to a few articles and guid on my website so I hope you have a great day and it's been really nice talking to you and we'll see you soon\n"