 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASUS VG278 144Hz LED backlit LCD monitor. This is 3D vision ready with light boost and is basically for Twitch gaming, whether you're playing like, I don't know, whatever the kids are playing these days, Counter-Strike Go or... I was going to say League of Legends because I know lots of people play that, but it's not exactly a Twitch game. See, Slick's giving me that look, it's like you have no idea what I'm talking about. I do know what I'm talking about and I do know that League of Legends isn't a Twitch game, but I also know that if you were at an elite level in League of Legends it would be more Twitch and he's giving me the nod now. So see there, I do know what I'm talking about. He's not giving me the nod anymore. So I'm going to go ahead and take out some foam here. They're using... Oh, this is like a semi-soft foam. It has some flex to it, however if it did take a serious beating at any point in time then it would probably break and lose some of its structural integrity. However, what you guys will notice about the monitor is that there's a lot of foam around it. So a lot of LCDs that you see, the LCD actually only goes to here. So there's a huge gap here. A lot of LCDs these days only have a tiny gap between the outside of the box and the front of the panel, which if your name is Linus and you worry about packaging is a deep concern to you because if anything were to hit that box hard enough to puncture it, it basically go right through your brand new LCD. I mean, odds are excellent that your shipping carrier as long as you've got insurance is going to deal with it and everything, but why take that risk if you don't have to? There's the base and everything's up packed. So I'm going to assemble the monitor and we'll be back in just a moment. Now actually before we assemble it I want to show you all the parts that come with it. So you've got an ASUS VIP member notice as well as your warranty information. ASUS has a fairly unique warranty policy for their LCDs, which apparently is not outlined on the box at all, but they do have a zero bright dot guarantee. So that means, yes, zero, whereas a lot of their competitors will not necessarily have zero bright dots guaranteed. I want to go over the specs as well, so two millisecond response times and it's going to need them if it's going to be operating at 144 hertz. If you have slow pixel response times, that is to say that when the color changes the pixel takes a while to register it, you can put whatever refresh rate you want on the monitor. It won't make any difference to how blurry and ugly the image looks, so you're going to have to have a super fast panel to achieve this. 50 million to one high contrast ratio, probably optimistic, but you know, okay. Full HD, 1080p, HDMI, although you're not going to want to use that if you're going to want to get those high refresh rates. You want to use dual link DVI, actually, yes, dual link DVI. Tilt, swivel and height adjust, splendid video intelligence technology and NVIDIA 3D vision to light boost, which makes a huge, huge difference. Although you'll only be using 120 hertz for light boost, the one 40, 40, the 144 hertz feature is more for 2D non stereoscopic gaming because it gives you just that little bit of extra time to react to something because it will give you the information a little bit sooner than a monitor that is taking, okay, here, think of it this way. You've got a 60 hertz panel, there's going to be up to 1.6 of a second for it to show you something that your video card already knew about, okay? Whereas if you have a 144 hertz panel, it will be less, it will be, okay, at worst case scenario, it will be 1, 144th of a second to show you the new information that the graphics card has obtained. So think of it that way. It's giving you the information a little bit faster, okay? So wherever that guy is, it's more accurate. There. Included accessories, so we've got a couple of screws for assembling it, nothing special there, audio cable for pass through, VGA cable, bleh, don't worry about that, power cable, dual link VDI cable, got some heft to it, as well as the base station, now we'll put it together and we'll show you the completed monitor. Now that we've assembled everything, we're ready to go ahead and have a look. This is pretty similar to ASUS's other 27 inch, 1080p, 3D vision 2 ready monitor, okay, in that it's got all of your usual adjustments. So I'm just going to go ahead and show you guys, we're going to pop that pin out at the back in order to enable the height adjust, just like that. So you've got a lot of height adjust here, you've also got your tilt, you've got your pivot, okay, which is done actually under the base here, there's a rotating piece right there, and then, oh yeah, we don't have that one, you've got your cable management right here. Speaking of cables, all the different cables that you can plug into it are located down here at the bottom. So you've got your audio pass through as well as your headphone jack, your HDMI in, DVI in, VGA in, as well as your power in, there, right there, over on the other side of the pillar at the middle. So you can see tactile buttons along the bottom here for all of your basic monitor controls. I still prefer tactile buttons, except in very rare cases where I like, you know, I like the 2420T from BenQ, that one's kind of cool with the touch sensitive buttons, but other than that, tactile is good. Lots of cooling on this monitor, which is important because in order to achieve the 144Hz refresh rate, ASUS has essentially overclocked the engine inside this monitor in order to get it to process pixels and process the images faster than it's actually, I guess, supposed to, which isn't to say that they're not going to throw all of their warranty support behind it and they're going to stand behind the product, but they're pretty much tuning the monitor before they release it to market. So that's the key difference between this one and the 120Hz version. So if you're looking for the fastest LCD monitor to date, right there. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look. Don't forget to subscribe to Mono's Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.