 The season for holiday gifts is upon us, and if your friends and family are anything like mine, that means it's up to you to buy yourself the things that you actually want. And if what you want happens to be a new gaming monitor, you are in luck, friends, because whether you're in the market for a super budget, high refresh rate display, or a balls to the holly decked walls HDR battlestation centerpiece, we have got a recommendation for you. Just like this recommendation for our sponsor. GlassWire allows you to instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. Let's start budget and then work our way up, shall we? If money's tight, allow me to introduce the number one best-selling monitor on Amazon, the $90 Acer SB220Q. You may remember this unassuming little beast from our El Cheapo build, where it stood out as one of the system's best value components. Not only is it full HD, 1920 by 1080, with FreeSync, and a much appreciated 75 Hz refresh rate, but its sleek chassis houses an IPS panel for improved viewing angles and color accuracy that's not utter garbage. Now, of course, the stand is about as basic as it gets, and it doesn't even have a display port input, but we're willing to live with that considering its two-digit price tag. Now, if you're in a similar situation, but you can scrape together an extra 60 bucks or so, this best-selling Scepter is 2.5 inches bigger, curved, if you're into that, and it rocks a 144 Hz refresh rate. Now, it uses a VA panel, a technology that's not really known for its quick pixel response times, so there is more motion blur than you would find on a TN, but at this price point, it's really hard to argue with, given that the C27 is such a great overclocker, has both HDMI and DisplayPort ports, and goes above and beyond with the accessories, including a DisplayPort cable and even a little screwdriver to assemble your monitor with. If you think 1080p is for peasants, while still not exactly being made of money yourself, then meet one of the cheapest 1440p monitors on the market that also has a refresh rate of 144 Hz, the CQ27G1. This thing is an absolute standout at under $250. I mean, so much value! You get a thin bezel, curved VA panel with deep blacks, a stand that adjusts on three axes, and multiple input options with their respective cables included in the box. The biggest downside of this monitor is its low brightness, but if you plan to primarily use it for gaming, we did find that you can make up for some of that by tweaking the saturation to your liking, because the thing is, the human eye perceives more saturated colors as being brighter. Just whatever you do, don't use the canned color profiles, because they are way too wrong. Ooooooh! If this sounds like the monitor for you, hold on a second though, because the next-gen version, the CQ27G2, is now available in China and is coming to Amazon.com in mid-December. It uses a different G-Sync compatible panel now, with a tighter 1500R curve, and while we haven't actually tried it yet, all signs point to it being a very good value, just like this garment I'm wearing, LTTStore.com. Now, for the main event. If you're prepared to drop a decent chunk of change on a strong mid-range monitor, we've actually got a couple of recommendations for you, starting with the 144Hz category. One of the most exciting monitors of the year for us was the LG27GL850B, purported to be the first IPS monitor with TN-level 1ms response times. Now, in reality, the monitor can't really approach that figure, unless you enable completely unsightly levels of pixel overdrive, but even if you dial it back, the response times are still fantastic, with shockingly little motion blur for an IPS. It's a 1440p monitor with adaptive sync, including the G-Sync compatible certification, and LG's NanoCell tech gives it a very wide color gamut, despite the fact that it's using an 8-bit plus FRC panel, rather than a true 10-bit one. Now, is the monitor perfect? No. It's an HDR-ent monitor, thanks to its pedestrian 350 nits peak brightness, so the contrast isn't amazing, and it does not offer a backlight strobing mode to further improve motion blur, but in my opinion, LG more than made up for that by pricing this new technology and impressive feature set at a $500 point that we consider very compelling. So compelling, in fact, that you actually might have a hard time tracking one down this time of year. So if that happens, here's plan B. The ASUS VG27AQ. It's $75 cheaper, can be overclocked to at least 155Hz, and was the first display to support backlight strobing with adaptive sync turned on, and this is called ELMB sync in ASUS speak. So if you're looking for an IPS with low motion blur, clearly, these are both great options. Of course, another way to combat motion blur is simply to have even higher hertz, like say, 240 of them. Now, the undisputed champion in this category for the past couple of years has been the BenQ Zowie XL2546, because even though most 240Hz monitors use the same 1080p TN panel made by AU Optronics, the XL2546 uniquely supports motion blur reduction, what they call dynamic accuracy or DIAC, all the way up to 240Hz. So for that reason, this monitor is still selling for $500 to $550, despite newer monitors that use next-gen panels with 0.5ms response times being available for $100 less. Fortunately, there is another 240Hz monitor with a similar full-range motion blur reduction feature that's only $340, the ASUS XG248Q. Its 6-bit plus FRC TN panel is made by Inalux, and it's 80 nits brighter, has adaptive sync, and, can't stress this enough, it's got RGB on the back. No, it doesn't come with a monitor hood or quick settings remote like the Zowie, but for up to $200 less, the XG248Q is also a great option. By the way, we're getting our hands on an Acer Nitro XV273X, which is the first 240Hz monitor that uses an IPS panel, so make sure you're subscribed for our upcoming video on how that compares to the usually faster TNs. Looking to expand your horizons with an ultra-wide? Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about you guys. We're gonna split this category in two, according to resolution. The lower-res 2560 by 1080 panels are gonna be easier to drive, so you can take advantage of higher refresh rates, like what you get with the LG 34UC89GB. This was actually LG's first 144Hz ultra-wide, which means that, since we reviewed it back in 2017, the price has come down considerably from its original $900. It uses an IPS panel with 300 nit peak brightness, hardware-level G-sync, and it's overclockable to 165Hz. But if you're like me and you're willing to upgrade your graphics card for the improvement in image quality that comes with nearly 5 million pixels at high frame rates, then consider the LG 34GK950F. It's 3440 by 1440 with adaptive sync, meaning that it is G-sync compatible, and it supports FreeSync 2 with a range of 48 to 144Hz, and it even has low frame rate compensation. Be careful here though, guys, because there's a variant of this monitor, the 34GK950G, that doesn't have, you know, the standard adaptive sync, but instead has hardware-implemented G-sync, which could be your preference, but that one actually has a lower 120Hz refresh rate. Interestingly, the G model debuted at $200 more than the F model, but that situation has now reversed, and you can get the G version for over $100 less than the F. This is also true of the lower-res ultra-wides that we mentioned earlier. Like the 16 by 9 27GL850 from earlier, the Nanocell panel punches above its weight in terms of color accuracy and gamut width, but also like that monitor, its contrast ratio is too low to really live up to its promise of HDR. If you want HDR, you're gonna have to advance to a god-tier display. On this plane of existence, there are no compromises. We're talking 384 zone, full array local dimming, a thousand nit peak brightness, G-sync ultimate, 4K resolution, and 120Hz refresh rate overclockable to 144, although that comes with some chroma subsampling, which I guess counts as a bit of a compromise. Two brands service this segment, each using the same panel made by AUO, but even though the ASUS PG27UQ and Acer Predator X27 have the same features and price, $1,400 down from two grand at launch, you should not leave which one you get up to a coin flip, because the ASUS suffers from a really loud fan that's just on all the time, even when the display is turned off. The Acer, on the other hand, gradually ramps the fan up when necessary, and the industrial design is a little cleaner if you're into that. Note though, that way back at Computex 2019, ASUS announced the next-gen PG27UQX, which uses more power-efficient mini LEDs to increase the dimming zone count to 576, reducing blooming around bright objects by up to a claimed 33%. That's not available just yet anyway though, and when it launches in, probably Q2 2020, we'd expect it to cost a cool two grand or so. Finally, if you really like those monitors, but you want them wider, you're in luck, as long as you have an additional $1,000 lying around. These 3440x1440 curved ultra-wide versions have 512 dimming zones, and can refresh at up to 200 times per second. Personally, after trying a couple high-performance ultra-wides for an extended period at home, I ultimately swapped back to the non-HDR, or at least not proper HDR, LG 38GL950G. It's $1,800, so it's still very expensive, and it doesn't have full array local dimming, but it still manages to be $700 cheaper than ASUS's gaming ultra-wide, while having a respectable 175Hz refresh rate, 38 diagonal inches instead of 35, much less motion blur, and no annoying wake-up bug, where sometimes I had to unplug and replug my PG35V. Micro Center has 25 Micro Center locations across the US, which is really good, because if they had locations that weren't Micro Center, that wouldn't make a ton of sense. Micro Center is featuring the Manegear Vibe 1 PC, exclusively available at, you guessed it, Micro Center. It's got an Intel Core i9-9900K processor, Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, and much more, and if you buy it in store, there'll be a $500 discount on the PC, so it'll be $29.99 instead of $34.99. If you're not near a Micro Center store, no problem, you can actually buy the system off Amazon at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching! If y'all are interested in gaming displays, be sure to check out this video, where I talk through the sweet new G-Sync over HDMI technology, since it's likely to end up in a monitor near you very soon.