Acer GN246HL 144Hz Monitor: My leap to higher numbers

[Timmy-P]

Hello, this is my first review, and it will be on a monitor I purchased last November:  The Acer GN246HL monitor.  It's sits at the standard 1920x1080p, but boasts a 144Hz refresh rate.  At the time of purchase, it was the cheapest monitor on the market at a high refresh rate, and went even lower in price shortly before Black Friday of 2014:  I got it at a steal of $200 on Newegg.

Shipping was superb; even with the free, 4-7 day shipping, I ordered it on a Wednesday, and it arrived next Monday; I would have gotten it by the weekend, but no one was home to accept the package on Friday.  There wasn't a single dead pixel from what I've been able to tell, despite the extra trip.

It arrived without a surrounding box.  It was your standard, it's-probably-in-the-back type of box.  Nothing too flashy, since I didn't want to pay for that type of thing anyway.  It came with a DVI Dual-link cable, which was ideal for my 650 Ti.  Both my GPU and the display lacked DisplayPort, so Dual-link DVI was my best best to soak up all dem hertz.

I've noticed that the "ergonomics" of a monitor, ie any type of swivel, tilt, or height adjustments the stand allows is sort of like rating the comfort level of headphones or computer mice; mildly subjective, can't be put into numbers, and is a make-or-break factor for the product.  The stand itself is sturdy, but there's absolutely nothing fancy; no height adjustment, rotations, angles, nothing.  All it does, is hold up the monitor.  That's all it does, and that's all I really expected it to do.  However, it does a good job at it's one task; when ever I shake the desk (or even move my mouse around violently for that matter) I notice my old Dell monitor will start shaking more then someone with stage fright while my new Acer didn't move at all.  I assume it's a lack of moving parts, but I'm not really complaining.

Speaking of my other monitor, this is a huge step up for me from what I've been used to:  a 1280*1024 monitor @60Hz.  I've been using that Dell monitor (which is now my side monitor) for almost a year, and just now I've been able to go 16:9, and also a higher refresh rate.  And holy pinkhearts is this refresh rate smooth.  Just navigating Windows or browsing the Web became SO MUCH SMOOTHER after I set this monitor up.  Granted, it took a few days of me going "I honestly see no difference" before going into NVIDIA control panel and realizing that the monitor was set to 60Hz.  A few moments of red cheeks later, I cannot tell you how much of a difference this makes after going back to 60Hz.  The games I've played with it are Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, and Garry's Mod, and in the times I top 100 FPS, I crack a smile at how smooth it is.  You could argue it's only relevant to those who play "twitch" shooters like Quake or CS:GO, however to me it's not about the advantage (which is relatively miniscule), it's about the experience.

Going from 5:4 to 1080p was cool as well.  Granted, I went from a 1280*1024 IDK panel to a 1920*1080 TN, so the color reproduction resulted in no difference.  However more pixels overall did yield to higher detail.  My first night with the monitor, I'm on top of gm_bigcity in Garry's Mod going "So this is what HD looks like!"

Monitor OSD gives you quite a bit of options; scaling, OSD timeout, contrast, all that good stuff.  However, one thing that got me was that the monitor is 3D-ready, and comes equipped with NVIDIA Lightboost, yet it was disabled in the Monitor's OSD.  Turns out you have to do some registry edits and/or EDID overrides to trick your GPU into thinking it's an ASUS monitor in order to get it working.  And even then it gives some type of hue over your entire computer when working, and grants flickering since I can't sustain a single framerate high enough, if at all, in order to take full advantage of it.  Lightboost is not a must, but it still saddens me to buy a product with an advertised feature, only to go out of your way and void the warranty just to get said feature working.

 

A couple other complaints.  The monitor had it's brightness at a full 100% right out of the box, and I was nearly blinded looking at it.  In order for me to bear those first few minutes of using it, I had to turn the brightness all the way down to 0, in which it's still as bright as my Dell.  And another minor complaint, more like a note, is the monitor takes a while to turn on/wake up.  Usually my Dell monitor would wake up in less than a second, while the Acer takes about five seconds to waking up the computer to displaying an image.

 

That's about it.  This is a no-frills monitor that is designed for a gamer who likes butter.  I love this thing.  It holds it's own, it's fast, smooth. and really, I love higher refresh rates now.  What makes this deal even better, is that the hardware running games are only getting faster, but now NVIDIA and AMD are both stepping up their game with 4K mind, so while everyone is stocking up on more pixels, I'll be getting the same gear and blasting through games with much higher FPS.

 

I will post pictures soon, so stick around.

 

Thanks for stopping by, please come again!

[Admiral Naismith]

Your review sums on my views of the monitor perfectly! I should mention that the monitor does have the ability to tilt, just not much.

 

The brightness was bad for me as well, even on the lowest setting I ended up using a dimmer program. And the start-up is so annoying, especially when trying to mess with the bios.

[Leonard]

@Timmy-P, while i liked your review i have to say the monitor is really good IMO. I got the lightboost to work using Strobelight Beta4 by ToastyX and most of the blur is gone even at 144hz but i can't get to initialize the full potential as strobe won't recognize the monitor as i didn't use the 3d emitter. I set the monitor to use the nvidia's settings and did some video adjustments in there and my screen looks good but still needs some adjusting, got mine 28.12.2015 $179.99. It is a surprisingly good TN panel IMO too.

 

I also don't like the stand but i never thought it would be any good and i had always plan to use a VESA mount.