 In the market for a 2560x1440 high refresh rate monitor that doesn't need to be overclocked, and also happens to feature G-Sync, Ultra Low Motion Blur, and 3D Vision? Welcome to my review of the only choice for someone who wants all of that stuff. The ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q. Cooler Master V-Series Semi-Modular Power Supplies feature 80 plus gold efficiency and their gold guarantee 5 year warranty. Click now to learn more. ASUS was wise to go with an ROG inspired design for this monitor. Physically and ergonomically it hits all the right notes for a top of the line monitor for me right now. The stand has the full gamut of adjustments, 12cm of height adjust, 60 degrees of swivel, 25 degrees of tilt, and 90 degree pivot with a VESA mount in the back, just in case none of that is enough for you. The styling is also spot on with aggressive rear vents, a cable management hole in the stand, a disableable red LED ring around the base, and that's it. No goofy stuff around the screen itself. No touch of color or whatever, that nonsense. Just a super thin matte black bezel that ensures that all of your attention is devoted to the screen, where it's supposed to be. Even the menu buttons are actually really good, something I wasn't expecting, given how much I disliked the ones on the PB287Q. This is the fastest to navigate on-screen display that I've ever used. I still don't like the rear shortcut keys because I can't tell which is which when I can't see them from the front, but the joystick combined with the super snappy responsive menu is a dream to use. Mind you, unlike other high-end monitors, the Swift's menu doesn't have a bunch of options in it, like volume adjust, picture-in-picture, and like a whack-ton of inputs to choose from. And when we flip the monitor over at the back, that reveals the reason. In the back, you'll find a DC power jack for the included power brick, a DisplayPort 1.2 input, and a dual USB 3-port hub that I really wish was on the base. And that's it. Because of the G-Sync module, which only supports one input, this monitor doesn't have an extra HDMI input for your game console. It doesn't have weak-sauce built-in speakers. It expects you to game on a PC with a proper pair of headphones or speakers, the way that Gayben intended. So far, if the product wasn't even good, I gotta say, I like its attitude. But does it suck? Is it not good? No! No, it doesn't suck. I find that 27-inch displays with a 2560x1440 resolution hit that perfect pixel density sweet spot, where the image looks sharp, but screen elements aren't too small to be usable, forcing you to use Windows's still terrible built-in scaling that causes blurry text in many applications. That, combined with the solid contrast and acceptable color reproduction, makes the monitor good enough for me to legit use as a daily driver. Something that I haven't been able to say about any of the 4K TN monitors that I've used so far, due to their lackluster contrast and need for scaling, or BenQ's high-end XL series monitors due to their 1920x1080 resolution. Now, to be perfectly clear, it is not flawless. Switching from the PA279Q monitor that I use at home to this was very noticeable. Contrast and colors are not as good, and viewing angles, while good for TN, are still TN, with horizontal color shift being difficult to notice in day-to-day use, but vertical color shift being very noticeable, especially on white backgrounds, with my head stationary, the top of the screen has a slight green cast, and the bottom does go a little bit pink. But yeah, nothing is perfect, and the trade-offs that you have to do with this monitor are just part of life, and at least you're getting a lot to like about the display in return. The maximum 144Hz refresh rate and 1ms rated response time makes more of a difference to the perceived responsiveness of your PC than you'd imagine, both inside and outside of games, and along with the headline G-Sync feature, you get stereoscopic 3D vision support, and ULMB, or ultra-low motion blur support, along with other nice touches, like the built-in crosshair overlay, although you're basically a butt-head if you use that for competitive play, and the near-instant power-on with no splash screen. Asus, I wanted to take a moment to let you know I noticed and appreciated the emission of this entirely unnecessary delay between pressing the power button and using my PC. Thank you. Alright, on to the gaming experience. Let's start with a quick refresh of what G-Sync is, for those of you who haven't seen my original coverage of it here, and that was a pun, by the way. Normally gamers have two options. Number one is running without V-Sync, which causes visual anomalies called tears, whenever a new frame is output by the graphics card while the monitor is in the middle of a refresh. Almost all games do it, but in some it is especially annoying. Number two is to enable V-Sync, where tearing is eliminated because the graphics card is forced to wait until the next fixed interval when the monitor will refresh to output a frame. This causes stuttering during FPS dips and, for me, an intolerable amount of latency between when I execute an action and when I see it on screen. I never game with V-Sync on. G-Sync eliminates the issues associated with both of these options by letting the graphics card tell the monitor when to refresh. That means a more responsive gaming experience without visual artifacts. This is next level stuff, guys, and the experience is truly awesome. You just turn it on in the driver to override other V-Sync options, and it's off to the races. If you're a gamer and you want the best monitor on the market today to play your games, this is it, period. I did most of my testing in Tomb Raider 2013, since I happen to be playing that game right now, and even though this monitor wouldn't be all that suitable for professional color work, using it recreationally, I really didn't feel like I was having the TN experience the way I normally do with high refresh rate monitors. In every scene, from vibrant outdoor jungle locations to darkened tombs where monitors with poor contrast will make it difficult to make out details, the Swift excelled. I also need some time to fire up a bunch of other stuff from my Steam library just to try it out. Frame rate drops below 30 FPS are still very noticeable, because even with G-Sync on, you will experience stutters when you dip that low. But, per the suggestion in the reviewer's guide, I actually tried using GeForce Experience's game settings optimizer for the first time ever, since it's designed to keep your FPS above 40 by default. And honestly, it actually worked pretty well. It made smart decisions for me that were similar to what I would have input, and while I'm still going to do it manually, because I'm a control freak, it did work surprisingly well for a quick, I don't feel like dialing in all my games right now solution. So that's it. I think this technology is great, and basically everyone else agrees. And over the next few years, availability of G-Sync and competing solutions will improve, and prices will fall until it's ubiquitous, because it's just plain better than the old way of doing things. But that's all hypothetical future stuff. This is the summer of 2014, and this is the ultimate gaming monitor if you don't want to wait another year at least for a gaming experience that is truly much better than what everyone else has right now. But there's a catch. I did most of my playing on a GTX Titan, and I'd recommend at least a GTX 770 for medium settings on modern games, or at least one GTX 780 for high in modern games, if you want to take advantage of the high refresh rate-ness of it at 1440p. Which, combined with the Swift's high price tag, makes this a very expensive upgrade, one that's going to be hard to convince people to invest in. You see, G-Sync has to sell itself to gamers based on the absence of annoying crap that we've all spent years getting used to and putting up with, rather than by delivering some shiny new thing for us to drool over. It reminds me of the upgrade to SSD. As long as you're still using a hard drive, it might seem extravagant and unnecessary to spend that kind of money on something with so little storage that doesn't increase FPS directly. But then you eventually take the plunge, and once you get used to it, it drives you bananas whenever someone puts you in front of a system with a hard drive in it. And that's exactly what G-Sync is like. Looking at tearing just feels stupid to me now that this solution is available. Even the ultra-low blur mode, which is an official version of the low persistence backlight strobing hack that folks have been using on light boost monitors, just doesn't get my attention at all. It's cool how much crisper moving images look. You can actually read text while dragging it across the screen, but in the game, it wasn't that noticeable to me, and since you have to pick between that and G-Sync, I'll take G-Sync every time. It's a truly next-gen experience, and from what I've seen so far, ASUS' first product to deliver this technology to the market is a slam dunk. Even aside from the fancy technology, let's say you're running an AMD card and you're not looking to change graphics cards right now. You should still be looking at this monitor versus the XL2720Z from BenQ for its higher resolution if you've got enough shiny pennies to afford it. Guys, thanks for watching this video. Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment, let me know. Are you shopping for a gaming monitor? What's on your short list? Always with our videos, guys, there is a link in the video description to where you can support us. You can buy a cool t-shirt like the one I'm wearing. You can give us a monthly contribution. You can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so we get a small kickback whenever you buy stuff, and I think that pretty much wraps it up. 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