Asus has a 540Hz monitor that lets you move its feet

Asus has a 540Hz monitor that lets you move its feet

It’s been seven months since Asus announced the world’s first 500Hz gaming monitor — long enough that it’s not the world’s first anymore. Alienware will beat it with the 24.5-inch AW2524H, which I wrote about this morning. But the important thing is that Asus will still have a 500Hz monitor, too — technically, a 540Hz overclocked screen dubbed the Asus ROG Swift Pro PG248QP that’ll ship in Q2.

It’s a 24.1-inch 1080p G-Sync panel that’s unfortunately saddled with TN screen technology, known for its refresh rates rather than viewing angles or wide color gamut. But the monitor pulls a pretty cool trick: the stand lets you pop in and out its feet to fit in narrower spaces and lock them in place.

Image: Asus

Asus’ 540Hz monitor has adjustable locking feet.

I bought my current Asus gaming monitor (the VG27AQ) in no small part because its small, squarish stand let it perch atop my NAS for the perfect viewing height, something I wouldn’t have been able to do with a lot of the V-shaped monitor legs on the market.

The other thing it has over the Alienware is a price: Asus rep Cat Tompkins tells The Verge it should cost $899 USD.

Image: Asus

A rear view.

It’s also got a built-in ESS Quad DAC with “near-zero audio latency,” presumably to pipe killer audio from your PC to its 3.5mm headphone jack. Asus boasts that it actually has “above 90% DCI-P3” in terms of the colors it can display. Its twin HDMI ports are HDMI 2.0 rather than 2.1, which means you probably won’t have variable refresh rate for your game consoles, though you’ll probably be using DP 1.4 from your PC to achieve the high refresh rates anyhow. Like the Alienware and some earlier monitors, it comes with Nvidia’s Reflex Latency Analyzer.

I still think 500Hz monitors are overkill for the reasons I laid out this morning: “the response time difference between a 360Hz panel and a 500Hz one is less than one-thousandth of a second — 0.78 milliseconds, to be exact — and only in games where your graphics card or chip can actually deliver 500 frames per second,” I wrote.

Image: Asus

Another angle on the 540Hz monitor.

But if that’s exactly what you’re looking for, you’ll have at least two options this year.

We’re seeing a lot of intriguing monitors at CES this year, and Asus has at least one more: a 27-inch 240Hz 1440p OLED gaming monitor with its own heatsink to keep it cool.