Things You Need to Know Before Buying a Gaming Monitor

Do you want to know what things you need to know before buying a gaming monitor? Yes, you are on the right place to know the answer of this question.

The monitors is an essential part of any PC, especially if you like and play gaming, since it is the device that is going to reproduce the images and it has to do so with the best possible quality.

There is no point in spending a fortune on the graphics card or the CPU if then you don’t have a monitor that is capable of keeping up with your components.

Choosing the ideal monitor for our PC is not an easy task. It can take you days or even weeks to collect the information to find your perfect monitor.

Things You Need to Know Before Buying a Gaming Monitor

Our goal with this guide is to simplify that search for both people who know more and people who know less, explaining all the necessary terms that you should know when choosing a monitor.

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1. Resolutions: 4k or Full HD Monitors

Let’s start with the easy stuff, resolution, which is the number of pixels (individual color points) that a monitor’s screen is capable of displaying. The definition of the monitor will depend on this and its size.

When looking for a gaming monitor you will find expressions such as HD ready, Full HD, 4k, and even up to 5k.

The screen market advances so fast that every year we find new things. But what do these acronyms mean? You probably already know many of them, but just in case we explain them to you:

HD Ready: It refers to the first high definition resolutions that came onto the market. They can be 720p (Progressive Lines) or 1080i (Interlaced Lines).

It’s currently deprecated and we don’t recommend it as it’s a pretty poor resolution for today’s games. But if your budget does not allow you more, go ahead.

Full HD: The most common format today, its resolution would be 1920 × 1080, also known as 1080p. It is a good option, since with these characteristics we can find very good options with an excellent quality/price ratio. Since the departure of 4k, it is also known as 2k.

4k: Officially known as 4k UHD. It’s been around for a while and its here to stay, 4k monitor’s double Full HD resolution, offering a total of 3840 by 2160 pixels on screen.

Little by little, these monitors are becoming popular compared to Full HD. These types of monitors are more expensive but offer excellent quality and if we have a good graphics card they are the best option to get the most out of it.

5k: What is on the horizon, they are already on sale but their prices are not suitable for all pockets. They project up to 5120×2880 pixels, achieving a hyper-realistic sensation that will leave you speechless.

2. Refresh rate and response time of a Gaming Monitor

The refresh rate is measured in hertz and the higher it is; the more images are drawn on the screen per second.

Surely you are thinking that the more pixels the monitor displays, the better its refresh rate has to be and you are right, especially if we are talking about gaming. The faster you refresh the monitor, the smoother and more fluid the graphics will look.

The refresh rates that gaming monitors normally use are usually 120 or 144 hertz (but you can find them up to 240 Hz), more than enough since depending on the sensitivity of each one’s eye, we may not notice the difference.

Other factors to take into account would be the response time, which specifies the speed at which the screen is capable of receiving new information, and which works together with the refresh rate to achieve the best possible visual transition.

If the response time is too high, residual pixels will appear on the screen until the screen refreshes and replaces them with new pixels.

This phenomenon is called “Ghosting” and it is quite annoying. Our recommendation to play is that the refresh rate is equal to or less than 2 ms.

3. Gaming Monitor Formats

The format is the proportion that the screen has with respect to its height and width. The most important when we talk about gaming monitors are the following:

4:3 (Square): The traditional screens are still widely used, although personally I would not recommend it for gamers, since the immersion is less than on widescreens.

16:9 (Widescreen): The most common today, it is the most recommended if you go for gaming since most developers design their games with this size in mind.

21:9 (Ultra panoramic or «cinemascope»): They are amazing, and thanks to the new curved screens it is very easy to adapt to such a wide vision. The problem? The price. At the moment, they are very expensive and not everyone can afford a screen with this format and that is of good quality.

4. Gaming Monitors LED or LCD

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) and LED (Light-emitting diode) refer to the technology used by the screen to backlight, in the case of LCD screens fluorescent tubes are used and in LEDs they are small diodes that are responsible for to emit light. If we get “picky”, all LED screens are LCD because they use LCD panels, but we are not going to delve into this so as not to get confused.

Currently the best option is an LED screen over an LCD, the advantages that the former offer over the latter are too significant to ignore:

• LED monitors are much thinner than LCDs, so they are lighter, and both the space they take up and their design make them superior to LCD screens.
• They consume up to 40% less energy, which represents a very significant saving when the electricity bill arrives.
• The colors are more vivid and the brightness is much higher.
• The useful life of an LED monitor is considerably longer than that of an LCD monitor.
• There is practically no difference in terms of price, so it is more profitable.

5. Different Types of Panel

Let’s go with the panels, each panel has different characteristics that we detail below, so you must choose the one that best suits what you are looking for:

Panels TN (Twisted Nematic)

TN panels are the most common and also the oldest. Their main advantage is that they give a very short response time, which gives them an advantage when it comes to gaming. They also offer quite high brightness and their power consumption is quite optimal.

Another factor to highlight would be its low cost, which means savings in the pocket of the consumer who achieves a fairly good quality at a reasonable price.

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The bad thing about this technology is that it offers the worst image quality. It loses quality depending on the angle from which you look at it, creating shadows and also that it does not represent colors too faithfully, creating distortions, so it is not one of the best options, unless our budget is limited.

Panels IPS (In-Plane Switching)

IPS panel technology offers a notable improvement over TN panels. They reproduce colors much better and do not lose quality if you view it from other angles.

They are the best option when we really appreciate the quality of the colors since the difference is abysmal.

In the past, they had very high response times but over time they have been improving with the introduction of super IPS (S-IPS) panels. Perhaps the only drawback is the price and that the hertz are not as high as in other monitors.

VA panels – MVA and PVA

Manufacturers constantly seek to improve their technology to be up to date, and this type of panel tries to combine the advantages of TN and IPS.

But unfortunately, they have not yet been developed enough. The MVA and PVA panels offer great quality both in contrast and in brightness and colors but at the moment they are not suitable for gaming since they usually produce «Ghosting».

I hope this little guide has helped you a bit when choosing a gaming monitor. If you have any questions or criticism, do not hesitate to write us in the comments.