<p>BenQ Zowie XL2546.</p>

- Koh Wanzi

The 24.5-inch BenQ Zowie XL2546 is a gaming monitor that’s targeted at the demanding niche of the community that is esports professionals. The XL2546 boasts a blistering 240Hz refresh rate, a 1ms grey-to-grey response time, and a 1,920 x 1,080-pixel resolution TN panel.

To be honest, the difference between a 144Hz and 240Hz screen is subtle at best, and it’s really only useful when your graphics card can keep up with it. Fortunately, many esports titles, such as CounterStrike: Global Offensive and Overwatch, are fairly easy to run, so you should have little trouble pushing out the required frames with a decent card.

Its features are aimed squarely at FPS players, where things like flicking, tracing a target, and controlling recoil feel more fluid and natural with a high refresh rate. I paired the monitor with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition and took it for a spin in Overwatch and Apex Legends, where everything from sprinting to tracing felt smooth as butter. Still, I’m no pro, but I imagine someone playing at the highest levels of a twitch-reaction shooter like CS:GOor Quake Champions would be able to benefit even more from the 240Hz refresh rate. And even if you’re just a filthy casual, this screen will be a huge upgrade if you’re still playing on a 60Hz monitor.

Further burnishing the monitor’s FPS credentials are features like DyAc and Black eQualizer. DyAc, short for Dynamic Accuracy, is BenQ Zowie’s proprietary technology for reducing eye-tracking motion blur. This is what happens when an object

This story is from the July 2019 edition of HWM Singapore.

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