ViewSonic VX2457-MHD 24-inch 1080p Gaming Monitor with 2ms, VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort and FreeSync Technology Reviews

I spent a couple weeks looking through various monitors before finally deciding on these. I’ve included images from my previous setup of a 24" LG LED and 2 LG 22" LEDs versus 2 27" ViewSonic VX2757-MHDs. This review will be lengthy so I will include a TL;DR at the bottom.

I am an avid gamer and also do instructional design work that requires quite a bit of time working at home. My games include Fallout 4, Witcher 3, any Civilization I can find, Dragon Age, the Mass Effect trilogy, and several other graphics heavy games. Instructional design requires quite a bit of work with photos and images as well as needing to be precise in layouts and contrasts. I demand quite a bit from my rig and needed to upgrade the monitors to match. Compared to my previous setup, I couldn’t be more pleased in my choice of these monitors, even having them for only 10 hours at the time of this post.

I have my primary connected via display port in order to take advantage of AMD’s FreeSync and have seen a huge improvement in my gaming. I will post my rig’s specs below. Witcher plays on Ultra graphics with absolutely no lag even when surrounded by enemies in a big fight. I used to suffer from screen tearing but that is now a thing of the past. Running Fallout 4 is like having a brand new game, especially during the night when the black stabilization kicks in and lets me see into the shadows far better than I had been able to before. For anyone looking for their first FreeSync capable monitor, I would HUGELY recommend picking this up.

For non-gaming, the monitor has also been a big step up in design and general entertainment. I am currently watching Ender’s Game while I type this out and can’t believe that the image I am watching is better than the 60" Vizio 1080p I have out in the living room. Colors are rich and clear, no ghosting to speak of even in the most hectic sequences, and paired with AMD’s Radeon cinema settings there is no comparison for movie watching. I have also connected both monitors to my work laptop (do not ask for specs, it is shameful) with outstanding results. The company I write for uses 80" displays in our classrooms and having these two monitors allows me to truly understand what our students will see when my training is presented to them. I have spent time with both PowerPoint (c’mon, you know it is the lifeblood of corporations) and Articulate Storyline on these monitors and have a hard time knowing I will have to be back in the office on Monday using far worse equipment.

The setup of these monitors was extremely easy. Packaging is well thought out and there was none of the tugging and pulling to remove the monitors from their packaging that we have all experienced in the past. This is a 27" monitor so there is a little wobble on them if you are pounding down on your desk but this should be expected. If you don’t want the wobble, spend a bit more and get a secured mount. Once I had these cabled up, one with display port the other HDMI, both monitors were immediately recognized and the picture was washed out. Basic brightness and contrast are set extremely high when they come out of the box, press a couple buttons and you will have that taken care of quick. As a couple other comments have stated, the buttons are located on the rear of the display on the lower right corner. They are a slight pain to deal with but you will get through it. Within 20 minutes I had both the monitors’ settings and my graphics card settings done and perfect images on both.

TL;DR
Buy these monitors, period. Without going to the 0+ range for displays, you will not find a better mix of response and quality.

I will update in a few weeks after more time spent.

My rig
Win 10
AMD FX-8350 (Vishera)
16GB HyperX DDR3 @ 669MHz
Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3
MSI AMD Radeon R9 390

For the most part this monitor is pretty a standard, decent monitor. No real flaws compared to expectations at this price, but nothing really standing out either… With one major exception: Freesync — As far as I’m aware, this is the least expensive 24" freesync monitor on the market. Which, really, is a pretty big deal. So, given that everything else works like you’d expect, this review will focus almost entirely on that one feature.

First, a quick overview of how freesync works, and what it means. Most people looking at this may already understand it fully, so feel free to skip. Basically, a monitor works by pulling displaying a scene a certain, specific number of times a second, on a precisely timed refresh cycle. A video card, on the other hand, works by rendering a scene from top to bottom, then immediately starting on rendering the next scene. The currently rendered information is stored in a buffer, and when the monitor’s cycle time rolls around, the current contents of the buffer are sent to the monitor. This process can be a problem if the monitor is timed to receive the buffer right in the middle of a refresh – the top half of the screen will be the next frame, where the bottom will be the prior frame. Especially when there is rapid side-to-side motion, this can cause ‘broken’ objects, walls, etc. on the screen – commonly referred to as ‘screen tearing.’ A common fix for screen tearing is ‘vsync’ – which is, in effect, having multiple buffers; the live buffer that gets rendered data, and the output buffer, which only gets refreshed when the live buffer is completely finished with a rendering. Unfortunately, for various reasons, enabling vsync can have serious performance and input lag impacts, making it often undesirable (admittedly, much of the problem here is software/implementation, but still…). Freesync works by allowing the monitor to vary its refresh rate, so long as the refresh cycle falls within a certain functional range. This monitor has a 48 to 75 hz freesync range – what that means is, as long as each frame is between 1/48th and 1/75th of a second after the prior frame, the monitor will refresh precisely when the next frame is ready, rather than its normal refresh timing cycle. If the framerate drops to 45 fps, or if it goes up to 80 fps, freesync will no longer have any impact.

So with all that said, the one reason this monitor doesn’t get 5 stars is, 48 to 75 is a pretty weak range. The upper bound I completely understand; at this price point, it would be unreasonable to expect a 144hz refresh rate at all (75 is actually the upper end for the monitor overall). However, I’d have really preferred to see a better lower limit, like 30fps. I strongly prefer higher refresh rates myself, but setting quality high enough to *usually* run at (for example) 60fps will often lead to occasional slowdowns, and slowing down to 30fps occasionally is still a pretty good experience – unless when that happens, you suddenly have glaringly obvious tearing alongside the slowdown. Having said that, it’s fairly straightforward to keep refreshes within this range – The AMD driver suite has the option to frame limit, so just setting a universal 75hz frame limit accomplishes the high end – then for the low end, simply make sure your game is set to quality settings appropriate to your video card in order to ensure it can almost always break 48fps. In theory, you could also go ahead and enable vsync; since the monitor will alter its refresh rate to match the buffer, vsync *SHOULD* have minimal performance impact while in the vsync range — but I think it’s a bad idea, since the objective of enabling vsync would be to fix tearing when framerate dropped below 48fps … and since that would only happen when outside of the freesync range, performance *would* be impacted, right when performance is already at its worst. Bad combo 🙂

So to take all that semi-technical info and put it into context of actual games:
PROS-
-No more screen tearing! (usually, within certain contexts)
-Very affordable!
-Darn good entry level monitor in general besides

CONS-
-75hz upper boundary on refresh may not be desirable, especially if you play twitch multiplayer games
-48hz lower boundary means you’ll need to be a bit more attentive to video rendering quality settings, or lose freesync effectiveness when you get slowdown

So if you ****HATE**** screen tearing, but also ****HATE**** the input lag usually associated with vsync, and if you don’t really play a lot of twitchy/mp gaming, this can be a great solution for a really affordable price. If you really love the higher refresh rates seen on other monitors, this probably isn’t the best choice, but all the options to fill that need are a noticeable price increase over this option.

Customer Video Review Length:: 2:15 Mins

This monitor was right up my ally, exactly what i needed for an awesome price! I cant wait to get another one!

The Freesync has truly change my PC gaming experience. After playing a lot of twitch shooters and MMOs I can see a world of difference. the Freesync ability alone is well worth the 0 price point, let alone a huge 27 inch monitor with a beautiful display. I’ve had other monitors at 24" that are low MS and "gaming" monitors without the freesync. nothing will ever replace freesync. this is the way to go on a budget.

the plastic is rather cheap with thick-ish bezel. easily attracts fingerprints. and I don’t really understand the big white piece that is the "pretty thing" at the bottom under the logo. wish it wasn’t there.

all and all it is a great monitor for a wonderful price.

cant wait to get another. maybe even 2 more.

Check out my video review of this monitor.