 The hotly anticipated ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q. Is it a worthy successor to the PG278Q, the monitor that I declared to be the best gaming monitor yet? Let's find out. The MasterCase 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. So, for those of you who have got other s*** to do, I'm going to cut to the chase a little bit here. The Swift PG279Q is even better than its predecessor in almost every conceivable way, with the only trade-off being marginally slower pixel response times due to its use of an IPS, or specifically AHPA, but I'll use the broader term for the rest of this video, panel instead of the TN panel in the 278 model. So if you want the best of the best 16 by 9 1440p display, look no further. But for the folks who think that TLDR just isn't enough to go on to make an informed buying decision, and the ones that watch our videos to drool over the tech porn as much as anything else, let's get into what makes the Swift PG279Q special and where it falls in the rest of the competitive landscape. First, the physical tour. If you've seen the previous ROG Swift, you've pretty much seen this one. Sexorifically slim bezels with even the logo adorned chin bar being skinnier than the side and top bezels of the monitors of days past, a sturdy and flexible stand design that allows tilt, swivel, pivot, and height adjust, an intuitive menu system with a handful of quick access buttons, and a joystick for the meat and potatoes of the OSD options, seriously, I cannot emphasize enough how much of a relief this was, coming from the abominable on-screen controls of the Acer Predator X34, and an aesthetic that with the optional red ring and ROG logo lighting effects enabled looks sufficiently gamery without being a complete eyesore if your gaming rig happens to also be in the middle of your living room. So yeah, they didn't change much about the exterior, but why would they? I already loved everything about the Predecessor from the outside, with my one complaint being the while very good considering it's a TN panel, the TN panel that just couldn't deliver the color performance and viewing angles of an IPS display. And that's where the PG279's upgraded guts start to come in. The 27-inch 1440p panel has been changed out to IPS, and on top of that, the 144Hz maximum refresh rate that made the original Swift such an amazing gaming display, assuming you had the kind of hardware horses to push that kind of frame rate in your games, has been upgraded, and through a setting in the on-screen menu can be pushed even further, so with NVIDIA's G-SYNC variable refresh rate technology, you can run your display at anywhere from 30 to 165Hz, depending on the frame rate that your game is being output at. And that's not the only thing that comes with the newer G-SYNC implementation. Now, to accompany the DisplayPort 1.2 port, there's a secondary HDMI 1.4 port, if you have a game console or a laptop or some other device that you want to be able to switch to on the fly. Because even though these other devices might not be capable of outputting games at higher than 1080p 60Hz, there are benefits to using a high-performance display. Backlight bleed was a non-issue on my sample. The measured total display lag with my Leo Bodner tester was 12.5ms on the 60Hz HDMI input, a very fine result. The motion blur or ghosting in the normal default overdrive setting was the best I've ever seen on an IPS display, with moving images, especially at the high refresh rates like 144 and 165Hz, almost being eerily clear. And thanks to the IPS panel, color reproduction was nothing short of awesome, with a stellar contrast ratio and color accuracy across the board coming in below a delta E of 5, with both gamma and white point being within acceptable margins right out of the box, with no adjustments made other than to overclock the panel to 165Hz before running my tests. Flipping awesome. But something to consider is that getting the panel overclocked to that level isn't a guarantee. First of all, you will need to abandon all hope of running ultra-low motion blur backlight strobing, since that only operates at 120Hz or lower with G-Sync disabled. Second, you will need a GTX 960 or newer Maxwell architecture card from Nvidia, with owners of older Nvidia and AMD graphics cards for the most part limited to 144Hz. And finally, while I can't comment on whether this will be an issue for this monitor, because I only have one of them, mine worked fine and they don't seem to be available to the public at the time of recording this video, it was pointed out to me that some users are not getting the full advertised 100Hz overclock on their Acer X34 Predator displays, so there might be some variability there. Which I guess raises the question, does it actually matter anyway? From my experience, no not really. I mean, overclocking the X34 Predator from 60Hz to 100Hz takes it from just an ultra-wide with G-Sync to the kind of thing that dreams are made of. Overclocking the PG279Q takes it from wicked amazing fast to wicked amazing slightly faster. If you are playing easy to drive games like Team Fortress 2 or CSGO at 165 freaking FPS, or if you have some kind of liquid nitrogen-cooled space age machine that can run newer AAA games at that kind of a frame rate while maintaining decent settings, because that is kind of the point of a G-Sync display, right? Smoother animations even when the frame rate dips a little bit, allowing you to turn up eye candy like Lara Croft's hair for a better gaming experience. So the last thing then to talk about is price. It's not cheap, but honestly I think Asus pretty much nailed the positioning of this product. It's about $150 more than its TN Film predecessor, but you get an IPS panel, slightly faster refresh rate, and an HDMI input. It also costs about $100 more than the IPS panel equipped Acer XB270HU that we reviewed back here, but offers a faster refresh rate and an HDMI input and also to my tastes a superior aesthetic design. So simply put then, it's expensive, but for competitive gamers who don't care about ultra-wide, note that I am not one of them and I prefer the Predator X34's curvy sexiness if not its price. It's the best gaming monitor ever. This is the kind of gear, especially if you're coming from run-of-the-mill 60Hz equipment, that actually makes it easier to track opponents and nail headshots. Well done Asus, you've upped the ante. Let's see how long you can hold the crown. So the advertiser on today's video is Wealthfront. I'll tell you guys a little bit about who they are, what they do, and also the offer that they're giving to our viewers as per the usual procedure. So Wealthfront is an online tool for managing your long-term investments, and the key here is long-term, because the way that their automated system works is optimized for long-term investments versus like making tiny transactions every day or even every hour. 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It's actually more entertaining than it sounds.