 You guys already know all about the cheapest 4K monitor that we unboxed and checked out a little while back, but the problem with that video is that the cheapest 4K monitor is probably not something that most people want. Because if you want the cheapest of anything, you're probably hooking it up to an entry-level system, in which case you're gonna struggle to run the latest games at 4K at decent frame rates anyway. So, today's video is about what you guys really want, the cheapest high refresh rate 1080p monitor. And, for good measure, we grabbed the second cheapest, and also the third cheapest, and we're gonna see which one makes the most sense for your gaming experience. Speaking of experiences, our segues are one hell of an experience. The Seasonic Prime Ultra Titanium Power Supply is an ultra-high efficiency 80 plus titanium power supply, it's kind of in the name, that's backed by a 12-year warranty. Check it out at the link in the video description. 🎵 Let's start with the Scepter C24. This one is gonna cost you just $155.99 on Amazon, which is just freaking outstanding. Like, I remember, it wasn't that long ago that to experience high refresh rate gaming, you were spending hundreds of dollars, not just like 150 bucks. So, it's 24 inches, it runs at a 144Hz refresh rate, it features a VA panel. I mean, that alone is mind-blowing for, you know, a $150 monitor. Again, not going that far back in time. And, it also features AMD FreeSync, which means that we may actually be able to manually enable G-Sync even. Although, if it's not on the G-Sync compatible validated list, the experience might not be that great. Throw that bad boy in there and use the included screwdriver to assemble it. Even like $5,000 TVs don't necessarily come with the screwdriver you need to assemble it. It's a nice touch. Wait, what, are you judging me by my screwdriver size? It's perfectly fine. Alright, that's better. Not much in terms of adjustment, but my expectations, again, are pretty low for a budget monitor. At least the stand is made of metal. But one thing that doesn't feel particularly budget is check this out. Like, again, not that long ago, getting HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort, both of which support the monitor's full resolution and refresh rate, was not necessarily a given. And, we've got a second HDMI, that one's just HDMI 1.4, if you wanted to hook up something like, you know, a game console in addition to your PC. Now, this is one you don't see very often. To save room inside the monitor and simplify the design, they haven't gone with an internal power supply. That's perfectly normal. But the thing that's not normal is for it to be just like one of these super basic wall warts. I mean, this is only like a 30 watt wall wart, 12 volts, 3 amps. Nice! They included a DisplayPort cable. Very nice. It actually doesn't feel like a complete piece of garbage either. That's freaking awesome. So one thing of note is that the monitor's not actually very curved. I was a little bit worried because 24 inches is pretty small. Like it does not require a curved display in order to get any kind of benefit out of it. But this is so subtly curved that it's pretty much not noticeable. So one thing that's noticeable immediately is that in spite of the fact that it's using a VA panel, you can see our whites are quite, they're quite gray, they're quite dirty. You know, just doing like a quick and dirty, you know, fire up an explorer window and drag it around. Oh yeah, okay, no, that's a fair bit of smearing. I was saying from moving the cursor around, it looked pretty good, but this is not a tremendous result here. There's one button for menu or back and confirm. And then there's another button that's a rocker for up and down. So I found a couple of interesting things in here. There's no option to enable overclocking or anything like that. But curiously, the Nvidia control panel magically healed itself. There's our 144 Hertz. Also, I found the overdrive setting, which to be clear is not the same as refresh rate overclocking. That affects how your pixels switch. And actually with it enabled, I'm not getting too many additional artifacts and that smearing might look a little better. So we're going to leave overdrive on for the rest of our testing. All right, let's see how this feels. Actually, not bad. Not bad at all. That low contrasty look ain't great. You know, it's not like this is the world's most visually fulfilling gaming experience or anything like that, but it is very, very usable. Like we've got a really high contrast border here and it's smeary, but it's not artifacty, which personally, I find a lot more bothersome than a little bit of smearing. For our final trick, I want to see if we can get more than 144 Hertz out of this thing. So we are running at 165 Hertz now. Now I've talked about this before. To me, that's not an immensely noticeable difference in smoothness compared to 144 or even 120, but hey, Hertz is Hertz. I'll take it. All right, well, why don't we push further then? I mean, should we try 240? Now I'm hoping that if we're way beyond the capabilities of the monitor, I will be able to see if it's skipping frames, but there's nothing obvious. Now I should be able to tell the difference between 240 Hertz and 144-ish. No, I'm definitely seeing some, yeah, no, this is not working correctly. So as I'm panning, there's just occasional small stutters or hiccups that I can more feel than see. Like it's not something I'm gonna be able to show you guys on camera. It does feel pretty darn smooth. And what I can tell you guys is that if it even mostly, that looked like a skip there. If it even mostly runs at 240 Hertz, then 165, 180, 200, probably no problem. The thing to watch out for with this monitor though, is that in spite of its very high refresh rate, you can see how this text is blurry when I'm moving my gun around. Its actual pixel response times are not great. So it's not like you're getting the full high refresh rate, you know, premium gaming monitor experience, but for the price, dang. So I was kind of hoping that the SEPTOR wouldn't be so great because that is a pretty high bar for the new Sync 24DP keys to match here. Let's go ahead and crack this puppy open and see what the experience is like. So just like the SEPTOR, this one runs at 144 Hertz. It's got AMD FreeSync, it's a 1080p panel, but unlike the SEPTOR, it includes an HDMI rather than a display port cable, and it uses a TN rather than a VA panel. With that said, at this price point, and given that what we're targeting here is high refresh rate gaming, rather than say content creation, that TN panel, assuming that it's not a horrific one, may end up being an advantage since our biggest complaint with the SEPTOR was that very significant pixel response time induced motion blur. Instead of like an attached sort of V-shaped metal stand for the base, you just get this very inexpensive piece of extruded aluminum with the screws pre-mounted in it, and then a simple plastic UFO frisbee base. Excuse me, disc, disc. Sorry. This is truly a very cheap mounting mechanism. Now, one nice thing about the new Sync, I guess, is that it has a larger power brick, 12 volt, five amps, but I'd say it doesn't weigh much more than the other ones, so I'm not sure how believable any of that is. Also, I don't actually see, are you supposed to have a CE logo on this thing for sale in North America, or UL, or anything I recognize? So instead of just sourcing multiple different power cords, they just use all Korean ones and then ship one of these super cheap flimsy adapters with it for the region that you're in. Now, I could just plug in the HDMI cable that was included in the box. It seems decent enough, but for an apples to apples comparison, if we wanna overclock, we're gonna need DisplayPort anyway, so I'm gonna go ahead and plug that in, and we can use this opportunity, actually, to take a look at the I.O. So unlike the SEPTOR, it only has a single DisplayPort and a single HDMI, and it doesn't actually specify what type it is here, but we can figure that out quickly enough. This is curious. There's enough room in the chassis to have an internal power supply. You can see they've actually got like a punch out here for an AC plug, but they went with an external power supply, again, probably to save cost. Curiously, yeah, you can really tell that it's got a very different interpretation of what colors should look like. And I think we're gonna restart the game just to see what's going on with all this weird kind of judder that we're experiencing. So let's go ahead and do that. It kind of feels like to compensate for the TN-ness, they've like cranked the saturation a little bit. But with that said, at least on the desktop or just browsing websites, it honestly looks pretty convincing. Like it's not bad. You can only really tell that it's TNTastic when you get to a more extreme viewing angle like that. See that? From straight on, it's not that bad. Older TN panels in particular, you'd really see things like this gray on gray for these icons here would completely disappear if you looked at them from an extreme top-down angle like this. I think it's fair to say that this is pretty darn good for a cheap TN panel. We've come a long, long way. What is that? Is that the monitor or is that my window? No control of overdrive or anything like that. Pretty much the only thing we can really adjust is turning free sync on or off. So our 144 Hertz option shows up out of the box this time. Oh boy. Uh-oh. Wah, wah. Well, that is a real shame because aside from this obvious problem running at 144 Hertz, let alone 240, I would say that our motion blur is significantly better. Like this text is much more readable. Why don't we try 120 and see what happens? No. Interesting. Why don't we switch over to HDMI? All right. So now we're using DisplayPort to HDMI adapter. Actually let's use the Nvidia control panel because I wanna see if we're getting those weird lines and it doesn't look like we are. Now we're limited to 120 Hertz. So that would be... Oh shoot, it did it again. Okay, now I'm done with this. Forget it. I mean, at this point we had to lean on SEPTAR for the screwdriver, for the DisplayPort cable. We can't lean on SEPTAR to also provide like the monitor and then still consider it an evaluation of the, whatever this thing is, new sync. You're done, you're out. That brings us to our last monitor, one that is actually marked down $20 right now to 160. You know, you could use that extra 20 bucks to buy a water bottle. Lttstore.com. Anyway, this one is from LG. It's their LG UltraGear 24GL600F and is the only one from like a, what I would consider to be a tier one recognized brand name. Also of note is that even at this price point, UltraGear is actually a new lineup from LG. We've looked at some of their higher end stuff. They didn't send this. We bought this, but we are expecting this to be like an all new model, completely new chassis, electronics, and all that kind of stuff. I actually have really high hopes for this one. Mind you, at this point, I feel like I'll settle for a UL logo on the power adapter. There it is. Good job, LG. Once again, SEPTAR stands out with their included screwdriver. I'm gonna use that to assemble the LG monitor as well. Getting my money's worth out of this thing. But in fairness to LG, while their arm here is actually made of plastic, the base is significantly more robust than either of the other monitors we've looked at. And if you care at all about the style of your display and you're trying to have like a nice looking desk setup, I think a lot of people will appreciate the little sort of splash of red accent that they've got going on. I mean, quality of the plastic is good actually. With that said, there's a lot of wobble in this. That's like five seconds of wobble if you hit it pretty hard. I.O. wise, things are looking pretty good here. We've got display port, dual HDMIs, headphone out, DC in. Pretty much what we'd expect. I have pretty high hopes for this one, even if it only includes an HDMI cable. I do understand why some monitor manufacturers, if they're just gonna include one cable, do opt for HDMI because from a compatibility standpoint, they don't know that this isn't for a dorm room where someone's hooking up their Xbox or whatever. So let's plug in our SEPTAR display port cable. Ooh, it's got nipple control. I like it. So an exciting thing about encountering a name brand monitor at this price point is that we can expect kind of a sensible, well laid out, fully featured OSD. And that's exactly what we get. So you've got all your sort of gaming profiles, which generally I don't think people really use, but whatever. You've got the ability to set both basic and extended free sync ranges, black stabilizer if you're into that. You can change your response times. Fast is generally the one that I recommend. That is the default. Don't turn these crosshairs on. You're basically a bad person, use your in-game crosshairs. But then all the other things that you'd expect to be able to adjust. So your color temperature profile and all that kind of good stuff. Also, one thing that's nice about the nipple is it's really easy to navigate without looking at it. If you wanna switch inputs, it's super intuitive. Unlike the last TN we looked at, which disappointingly had other flaws that just made it not a feasible option. This one does not stand out as having particularly vibrant color or exceptional contrast. Viewing angles though, like the other one, are decent enough. This is a modern TN as opposed to an older, absolutely craptastic one. You know, that is a really weird kind of motion blur we're looking at here. So it doesn't have a long trail, like the VA panel of our scepter, but the text is not readable at all. It's kind of like they're overdriving it really hard. So it ends up not looking clear, but you don't see a long trail on anything. And then it has one millisecond motion blur reduction time. Now hold on just a gosh darn minute here. Now it's doing backlight strobing and that is awful. Like it's not smeary, but you end up with sort of these discrete trailing images because of the backlight strobing. That's not something I would recommend turning on on this thing at all. While we're at it, I'm actually gonna change the response times down to normal and see if we get less of that artifacting. Nope, you can still see here. So this is an overdrive artifact where our Xs are actually turning green as we move this window around. Let's turn it off. Now we're definitely getting smearing. Now in fairness to LG, while those overdrive artifacts were really undesirable on the Windows desktop, this is the most readable that we've seen this text while moving the camera around. And I think it's fair to say that our color profile is better than the scepter with better native contrast. It is noticeably better in game, even if there are things I really don't like about it from the desktop. Yep. So that's interesting. We set 165. The monitor, I don't know, maybe could do it, but, and maybe this is the other edge of the double-edged sword of LG's more sophisticated firmware, they are basically putting an error message on the screen that says, no, you actually may not do that. Also, this stand really isn't very good. So conclusion time then. This was really surprising to me. On paper, I was not expecting to like the scepter. VA panels aren't known for their amazing response times, and we did get some ghosting, but it has other redeeming qualities that I felt really made up for it. It's got great inputs given the price point. It was massively overclockable, even though we might've gotten a peach here, but it'd be clear, we just bought it off Amazon so you could just as easily get one as us. And while the curve is not something that I desired, what I found was that it's so subtle that it just wasn't noticeable at all. With that said, for a mere $5 more, if I'm not interested in overclocking my monitor and I want something that's a bit more of a polished experience, LG's UltraGear also really stands out. With that said, we don't know if this promo is gonna last forever, and at a $25 difference, to me, if you're going for a budget high refresh rate monitor, the SEPTOR easily wins our pick. Speaking of things that win our pick, this segue to our sponsor, Volta Magnetic Cables. The Volta Magnetic Adapter 2.0 allows you to add Volta's snag-free feature to any cable. It's compact, it's got a reversible magnetic tip, it's cross-device compatible, so you can use a single cable and go from charging your iPad Pro to your iPhone, and the blue LED shows that the cable is plugged in and powered. It supports OnePlus's Dash Charge, Huawei Super Charge, and fast charging, and they've got a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you're not happy, you can send the item back and get a full refund. So thanks for watching, guys. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, maybe check out our other review of LG's high-end UltraGear monitor. We'll have that linked below, and I will see you next time.