Alienware AW2521HFA 24.5 Inch Full HD (1920x1080) Gaming Monitor, 240Hz, IPS, 1ms, AMD FreeSync Premium, NVIDIA G-SYNC Compatible, DisplayPort, 2x HDMI, 5x USB 3.0, 3 Year Warranty

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The monitor provides comprehensive sRGB colour gamut coverage and a bit of extension beyond, but stays well short of extended colour spaces such as DCI-P3. The gamma curve is shown below for our ‘Test Settings’, with similar performance here to the factory defaults. Some game engines will also show stuttering (or ‘hitching’) for various other reasons which won’t be eliminated by the technology. The panel’s native colour gamut is slightly larger than sRGB with the volume of colours produced reaching up to 112% in Standard mode, which equates to around 77. The final column includes a reference screen, the Acer XN253Q X which is a very fast 240Hz TN model with well-tuned pixel overdrive.

These were briefly explored in the OSD video, but for the purposes of this table we’ll be looking at manual adjustments and settings we feel have more utility. Either way, where the frame rate drops below the floor of operation a frame to refresh multiplication technology (what AMD refers to as LFC) kicked in to keep tearing and stuttering at bay. Pixel response behaviour was similar under the ‘Fast’ setting whether Adaptive-Sync was active or not both in this test and more broadly. Other panel-related specifications include a strong 400-nit peak brightness and a static contrast ratio of 1,000:1.Together, the monitor certainly didn’t provide a deep and atmospheric look to dark scenes and is more suited to viewing in a well-lit room.

Maintaining high refresh rates together with low input lag is paramount in ensuring that one’s chances to victory or not hindered by any external (to the game) factors. For AMD cards, FreeSync works over both HDMI and DisplayPort whereas with NVIDIA cards, you’ll need to use DisplayPort and have a GTX 10-series or newer GPU.

This title has a lot of ‘high contrast’ scenes, with very dingy backgrounds and pulses of energy, explosions and lightsabers offering some illumination here and there. Should you want to dispense with the stand and use your own (or wall mount it) that’s possible, too, since the screen has VESA standard 100mm mounting points but it would be a shame to miss out on such a stylish stand. There were no clear flashes of saturated red, orange or green or shifts between these with a bit of head movement. You could assign such settings to ‘Game 2’ or ‘Game 3’ as well as they’re identical – it’s easy to flick between these presets and another one by assigning them to a ‘Shortcut Key’ in the OSD. It is satin black plastic with a blended light grey ‘Alienware’ logo in the centre, the same width as the stand neck.