Acer Predator X25
The latest speed demon in Acer’s gaming monitor range was designed to help you kill latency.
Acer’s got a new range of Predator monitors that cater to a few different gaming preferences, but if you’ve got a need for speed the 24.5-inch, Full HD Predator X25 is going to be your beast of choice. To put it bluntly, unless you’re a pro gamer, or you’re finding yourself often facing-off against Twitch streamers, then you really don’t need a monitor with a 360Hz refresh rate. There are a heap of 144Hz and even some 240Hz monitors that go for less than half what it’ll set you back for the full 360Hz. That said, if you’re already at the top of your game and you’re looking for that extra competitive edge, there’s arguably no better way to do it than to get the fastest monitor you can.
The Predator X25 has a grey to grey response time of 1ms with some tests rendering in just 0.3ms, which means your screen is going to show you what’s happening between five and 10 times faster than a cheap non-gaming display. The only other gaming tech likely to have this big an impact on competitiveness is your internet ping. Add to this the additional smoothness from over 300 frames a second and you’ll have a major advantage on the movement and flow of the game.
In addition to speed, the Predator X25 has also been designed to feature precise colour accuracy. While it doesn’t have an overly wide colour gamut the screen does feature a Delta E of less than 1, which means the colour variation between its pixels is small enough to be used for professional sRGB colour grading. While most pros will need a wider array of colours than full sRGB, this monitor is at least Vesa HDR400 so it’ll go some way to looking more vibrant than your average gaming monitor, and it’ll perfectly represent shadow and in-game brightness to ensure you’re not missing anyone lurking in the darkness.
The screen includes Nvidia’s new Reflex Latency Analyzer to allow you to test your overall system latency to see where your game is bottlenecking in its response time. Unfortunately there’s a few hoops to jump through to use this tech. The most prominent is that you’ll need to buy a new Reflex Latency-capable mouse. It’s unfortunate that this tech doesn’t just work with your gear off the shelf, but there were at least 21 compatible mice at the time of writing, and if you’re forking out thousands for a new pro screen, it’s not that much of a stretch to upgrade your mouse too. Without a paired mouse you’ll pretty much only get access to ‘Render Latency’ (as long as you’ve got an Nvidia GPU), which you can display using the GeForce Experience on screen overlay, but with the right tools this software can break down mouse latency, PC lag and display latency so you can see your weakest link. To run it properly you’ll pretty much need to have upgraded all your equipment already anyway, but it’s a neat tool for serious gamers to ensure their equipment is up to scratch.
With a solid stand, ample interface options and an easy to navigate menu, the Predator X25 ticks all the boxes you’d want for a pro gaming screen.
A great pro-level Full HD gaming monitor with a few neat perks for a premium price.