Products You May Like
How much gaming monitor can you get for £100? Not much, it turns out – but I did spot something unexpected for £10 more: a genuine ultra-wide monitor. Now, it’s not a stunner as far as looks go, and it’s not got the latest specs either. But what it has got is an expansive 25-inch span, a 2560×1080 resolution and a blistering refresh rate of… 75Hz. OK, so it’s far from the best gaming monitor on the planet, but getting an IPS monitor of this size is honestly not bad going – especially as it’s been reduced from a UK RRP of £170.
This monitor should be a pretty awesome choice for slower-paced games like Civilization or Forza Horizon 5, where you’re enjoying the atmosphere and taking your time to choose your next move. The IPS panel assures good colour accuracy and wide viewing angles, and the 5ms GtG response times and 75Hz refresh rate mean that faster-paced content shouldn’t fare too badly. Contrast will be lacking, in common with other IPS panels, but you can at least rely on 99% sRGB coverage which should allow you to use this monitor for light content creation workloads too.
In fact, the whole ultra-wide 21:9 aspect ratio is well-suited to getting work done, as it allows you to have two decently-sized 1280×1080 windows open at once, rather than two squashed 960×1080 ones as you’ll experience on a monitor with a more standard 16:9 aspect ratio. It’s tough to go back to using just one window per monitor after you’ve experienced the bliss of side-by-side action – there’re even keyboard shortcuts, Win+Left and Win+Right, that make it super fast and easy to fill the screen with whatever you’re working on. I used this all the time in university – like Wikipedia on one side and a Word document in the other, or my code on one side and StackOverflow on the other one.
Anyway, I’m rambling. It’s rare to find an ultra-wide monitor for this kind of money, so if you’d like to try this unusual aspect ratio and don’t have enough money to stretch to a 3440×1440 model, this is a decent shout!