 In the old days, I could just go to the store with X amount of dollars in my hand, till the sales rep I had amount of dollars X minus two, then after some upselling I'd walk out of the store having spent X amount on whatever Samsung monitor fit my budget. Well, thanks to Acer and LG, my life has gotten a lot more complicated lately, with LG seriously upping their game and delivering some amazing curved and ultra-wide displays, and Acer waking up to the existence of the gaming market in a focused, fierce manner. Well, today's ferocious gaming monitor is the Predator XB270HU from Acer, and it might just be the best I've ever seen. Now this isn't the first time Acer has blown me away with a gaming monitor. Their XB280HK became my 4K monitor of choice for gaming, thanks to being the first 4K display to feature support for G-Sync, a technology that eliminates the annoying screen tearing that's associated with uncapped frame rates, and the stuttering and lag associated with V-Sync for users of compatible Nvidia GeForce graphics cards. But I still had some issues with it. For one, the 3840x2160 resolution is extraordinarily difficult to drive in AAA games, even for high-end graphics cards, so you gotta factor in constant video card upgrades in the cost of your gaming setup, and for two, while TN monitors have improved dramatically in the last couple of years, it's still a TN. So that means lower contrast, worse color performance, and lesser viewing angles compared to VA or IPS-type panels. So ultimately, the monitor that won the spot on my gaming desk was the ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q, which fixed a couple of those problems. Well that changes today. The XB270HU delivers some absolutely jaw-dropping specs that will make it the weapon of choice for just about any gamer. It features a 27-inch 2560x1440 IPS panel with that G-Sync technology I mentioned before, giving folks who are willing to trade some response time and refresh rate for better visuals a chance to finally try G-Sync, which... Oh, hold on, sorry, let me just put that away. Sorry, so like I was saying, IPS lovers can trade response times and refresh rate to finally try G-Sync with... Okay, for crying out loud, sorry, I gotta take this, just... Yeah, what is it? I'm in the middle of filming this... What? You're sh**ting me. Okay, that was Acer. There is no trade-off. The XB270HU is also the first IPS 2560x1440 monitor that supports a 144Hz refresh rate natively, out of the box. That's on par with the TN-based PG278Q, with no overclocking tomfoolery required to get that performance. And while pixel response times are a touch higher than the top TN panels, about 4ms vs. 1ms, 3ms of response time is definitely a trade that I'll make for the better experience of IPS, especially for only a $20 price premium over its closest G-Sync supporting competitor. So maybe the physical overview will reveal some fatal flaw or something? The XB270HU features a rounded glossy... blech. Base with an orange accent ring, okay, so it's not doing that well here so far, connected to a stand with support for the full range of ergonomic adjustments, tilt, swivel, height adjust, and pivot. Alright, this just got a little more interesting. At the back, we'll find the usual G-Sync monitor I.O., so power and display port. This is a G-Sync limitation, so there's nothing Acer can really do about it without implementing a full additional scalar, like BenQ did with the XL2430T, along with a USB 3 hub with two ports underneath at the back, and two on the left-hand side of the display. And since we're moving in that direction, let's have a look at the front. Oooh... marks off here again. Acer went and put a reasonably slim, albeit not as slim as the PG278Q, bezel on here, but they went and made it glossy. When will they learn? Thankfully, the panel itself is a really nice semi-mat, so kudos for that. Moving on, the on-screen display, which can be accessed with the buttons at the bottom right, is fairly limited. This is once again a G-Sync issue, with brightness adjustment, pixel response time adjustment, that I'd recommend leaving on normal, some rudimentary color profiles, and then a couple of cool things. You can put a very narrow refresh rate indicator on the left side of the screen, so if you're obsessive about that kind of thing, you can keep an eye on it, and there's also the menu for ultra-low motion blur, a backlight strobing technique that, unfortunately, can't be used at the same time as G-Sync, but does have the extremely positive effect of significantly reducing the smeary appearance of moving objects on the screen. The only caveats here are that you're limited to 100Hz, which is still very noticeably better than 60Hz, by the way, and maximum screen brightness is significantly impacted by this setting, since it's effectively turning the backlight on and off many times per second, to simulate the way that CRTs worked by flashing an image versus displaying and then holding an image on the screen until it updates. So let's talk about using this puppy then, shall we? Well, it's awesome. I actually don't really know what else to say about it. G-Sync has been and continues to be awesome. 1440p continues to be a sweet spot for gamers who want more than 60fps, without spending ludicrous amounts of money on three- or four-way graphics card configurations that deliver results that are only sort of better in many cases, as you'll see in this video here, but don't want to be stuck in the 1080p stone age, and the IPS panel on this thing is unlike any I've ever seen before. You see, the thing is that faster refresh rates have been done, but it's the pixel response times that have been an issue for high refresh rate IPS monitors in the past. So mouse cursor movement or in-game movement would feel really responsive because the game engine is getting more frequent updates, but the on-screen image could often look blurry and kind of rubbish because it just wasn't able to keep up. Not the case. Even without ULMB, so being able to take advantage of G-Sync, the experience of gaming on the XP 270HU is absolutely fantastic. Okay, hold on a minute here, Linus. There's gotta be a catch. Nothing in life is free, and even if you claim gaming in front of this monitor is lights-out amazing, with very little perceptible motion blur, no perceptible input lag, better image quality thanks to its sRGB IPS panel, etc., there's gotta be something. Alright, well, let's try then, shall we? If I had to come up with a reason not to drop your other plans and buy this monitor right this second, I guess it would be this. Look how far we've come in the last couple of years. Monitors are changing at a rate that we haven't seen in years, and new technologies like AMD FreeSync, an open and lower-cost competitor to G-Sync that only works on AMD cards right now, are only just emerging. So if you're afraid something better will come out very soon, then this is a lot of money to spend on a display. But the other side of that coin is that this is a really amazing monitor that I believe any gamer would be happy with. The first no compromises display that I've seen, and the one that I'll be using for gaming until a 3440x1440 144Hz IPS ultra-wide equivalent steps onto the playing field. Well done, Acer. Well done. Which I guess brings us to, uh, Dollar Shave Club somehow. Dollar Shave Club is the club you join if you want to get razors and other bathroom supplies shipped directly to your door for only a few bucks a month. Did I mention that they're high quality razors? You can also get their Dr. Carver Shave Butter, their One Wipe Charlies peppermint scented butt wipes for men, their post-shave moisturizer, as well as travel sizes and some of that stuff too. They've got a variety of razors available all the way up to the Six Blade Executive, and they're just plain quality. There's no vibrating handles or other kind of nonsense, however much fun a vibrating handle might be. Sorry, what were we talking about? Right. It's available at DollarShaveClub.com slash Linus, and you can get it in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They're one of our longest running partners, and they're... The only complaint we ever hear about them is that they're not available in more countries, so try out the club today. Alright guys, thanks for watching. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, uh, leave a comment, preferably at the link to our forum in the video description if you wanna leave a comment. Also linked in the video description, you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, give us a monthly contribution, change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so if you were to say, for example, buy this monitor, we would get a kickback if you go through our link. That kind of stuff helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that cool stuff.