Viotek Gn35da 35-inch Curved Ultrawide Gaming Monitor Review

Today we're looking at a monitor from a brand nosotros've never used before, but 1 that gets heavily requested: Viotek. They're pop on Amazon and make some of the cheapest gaming monitors you can go, so we're interested to meet how they stack upward and whether it's worth buying this sort of monitor over a better known brand option.

The monitor we have to review today is the Viotek GN32LD. This FreeSync display is 31.v-inches in size, and packs a curved 1440p VA LCD that tops out at a 144 Hz refresh rate. It'due south priced at $470 through Amazon, which is around the marker of another budget brands similar Pixio and MSI that have monitors based on the same panel, but it'due south a lot cheaper than the Asus ROG Strix XG32VQ or Samsung C32HG70 for example.

When testing out budget-oriented monitors nosotros're always wary of a few things: is the build quality any good, and is the display defective in any way? To address that second point first, our retail monitor shipped with no problems whatsoever, and then no dead pixels, and Viotek offers a full replacement if your monitor arrives with a dead pixel so it's not something to be overly concerned virtually.

As for build quality, the GN32LD is fine. It's non particularly amazing, and I certainly wouldn't class information technology as a high-end construction, just it's fine for a gaming monitor. The base of the three-pronged stand is metal, just otherwise the stand up's colonnade and the balance of the monitor use grey-ish plastic with a few cerise highlights. The plastic used on the pillar feels particularly inexpensive as it uses a really basic finish, though it'southward a bit better on the rear of the display itself.

Overall, Viotek is using a gamer design which I tend not to adopt, there's a lot of strange angles and vents that it probably could have done without. There's besides 2 RGB LED strips on the rear which add naught to the design, I mean you're not even able to encounter them during standard performance and their RGB support is basic. Plus the RGB clashes with the cerise highlights so overall it's a chip of a strange choice.

The stand is sturdy and does back up both superlative and tilt adjustment, although its top adjust is quite limited. There'southward no swivel supportn - not that swivelling is that important - and there'southward also no cable management hole, which again is a bit of a nit option.

My biggest issue with the design is the OSD controls. Viotek take gone with four buttons along the bottom edge of the panel, which makes navigating through the OSD a pain compared to a directional toggle. All monitors should use directional toggles with menus of this complexity, no exceptions.

Nevertheless the OSD itself includes a lot of features you'd also observe on monitors from other brands, and then you're not missing out on much going with the cheaper Viotek option. The OSD includes things like a depression blueish light mode, crosshairs for cheating, a super resolution characteristic, and fifty-fifty picture in picture, along with the usual image quality controls.

The array of inputs on the GN32LD is basic: DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, plus an audio output jack. The monitor supports FreeSync with low framerate compensation, then you become the adaptive sync across the entire refresh range upward to 144 Hz. And I still think the combination of resolution and refresh rate the GN32LD provides - it's a 2560 x 1440 monitor after all - is perfect for nearly gamers with reasonably high-end hardware, it gives a keen mix of smoothness and clarity.

The Samsung VA panel used features a 1800R curvature, I'thou more than a flat panel kind of guy with 16:9 monitors merely at 32-inches in size the curve isn't that bad. Plus right now there aren't many options for monitors of this size and specs that aren't curved, so yous're pretty much stuck with it anyway.

Allow'due south talk a bit more virtually the panel and see how our exam data matches up to Viotek'southward claims. For effulgence, they list 280 nits of typical brightness and I measured a peak of 365 nits, which is going to be likewise bright for most desktop users. The contrast ratio falls a footling brusque of Viotek's claims though, at a touch on under 2500:1 compared to its rated "3000:1" value, although as this is a VA panel we're still getting that nice high dissimilarity ratio. It's as well good to run into this contrast ratio held throughout the effulgence range.

New to our test suite is response time testing, 1 of the well-nigh heavily requested metrics. We've bought some of the fastest tools available to test response time and gone nigh testing some of the monitors nosotros had on hand, and over time equally we practise more than monitor reviews we'll get a larger set of data for some sweet comparisons. Simply the good news is nosotros tin can now provide this fundamental metric that tells us a lot about smearing, ghosting and how suitable this monitor is for gaming.

And then, Viotek claims a 3ms grayness-to-grey response time using overdrive, but in my testing using the "high" response fourth dimension setting - the highest setting available and the optimal setting for this monitor - I recorded but an 8.2ms average grey-to-gray response, which is quite slow but within a normal range for VA panels. Equally nosotros know, VA is one of the slower LCD technologies and that's on show in this result.

Information technology might besides be useful to know that on average, rising times were significantly longer than fall times, virtually double beyond our test points, and mid-grayness transitions (for case, 20% white to 80% white) are particularly sluggish. I too recorded a fifteen.1ms black-white-blackness transition time, which shows you the time required to make the largest luminance transition, in case you were wondering.

The important thing to note here is that both the average greyness-to-grey response and rising times in general actually took longer than the refresh window. This is a 144 Hz monitor, so the frame is updated every 6.94ms, except this panel only transitions in, on average, 8.2ms. This means that in some cases you might not exist getting a true 144 Hz refresh because the crystals themselves simply can't transition fast enough to show a completely new image at that rate. While you lot don't become whatever noticeable overshoot, smearing and ghosting are concerns due to the long response time.

However this isn't an result with this Viotek monitor specifically, rather all monitors that use the aforementioned Samsung VA panel volition have response times roughly equal to what I've shown here. Then don't recollect yous're getting a faster display if you purchase the MSI or Asus monitors instead; they notwithstanding use the same panel so they are also faced with the same inherent limitations of the VA engineering science. Equally for Viotek's 3ms response time claim, not exactly accurate to say the to the lowest degree.

The adept news is the GN32LD exhibits excellent input lag of but a few milliseconds, so while transitions aren't especially fast, the monitor processes its inputs chop-chop and gets on with the chore. And yeah, nosotros take the power to test input lag now likewise, which we've normalized for the tools nosotros're using to give an approximate of the display's processing time. And unlike some lag testing tools out there, our custom solution works at the display's native resolution and refresh rate.

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Source: https://www.techspot.com/review/1667-viotek-gaming-monitor/